The Comfort of Strangers

Paul Schrader’s film The Comfort of Strangers is easily the best adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel. It is a short book (128 pages) and it was only his second, written long before he developed into a "literary" author. Even so, the novel is sufficiently sui generis to make it more than just a horror story of a young English couple who encounter a pair of Old World weirdos in the maze of Venetian alleys. 

As someone who has never been to Venice, I owe a debt of gratitude to all those novelists, from Henry James and Proust, to Wilkie Collins and Thomas Mann, who used it as their setting. They helped to situate that most illusionary city in our minds. McEwan contributed his novel to this list of fictional Venetian explorations: 

A narrow commercial street, barely more than an alley, broke the line of weatherbeaten houses. It wound under shop awnings and under washing hung like bunting from tiny wrought-iron balconies, and vanished enticingly into shadow. It asked to be explored, but explored alone, without consultations with, or obligations towards, a companion. To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy. 

Under the opening credits, the film glides through an impossibly opulent Venetian house where we see a woman and we hear the voice of Christopher Walken speaking the first lines of the “My father was a very big man” speech that we will hear twice more in the film. Then we see a young man on a balcony of the hotel Gabrielli in the bronze afternoon light. He is Colin. He and Mary are English tourists in Venice. They are unmarried, but have been together long enough to consider going further in their relationship. They spend their days mostly lolling together in their hotel room. 

Though they’ve been to Venice before, they can’t go out very far without a map and can never seem to leave their room until it’s too late to find an open restaurant or even a street food vendor. One night they forget the maps in their room and get lost looking for a place to have a meal. They encounter Robert, a resident of the city, who leads them to a bar. While Robert tells them his story at the bar, they drink a lot of wine, and when they leave they simply decide to sleep in the street. On waking, they find their way to the great plaza (Saint Mark’s), but can’t manage to get even a glass of water. Robert finds them there and insists they accompany him to his house. They take a boat taxi to his villa on the Grand Canal (we were shown its interior under the opening credits). 

Next we see Colin and Mary lying naked in bed in an exquisite room. Unable to find their clothes, they must improvise. They meet Caroline, about whom Robert told them the previous night. She is his Canadian wife, and they sit in the waning light of the day talking. When they leave, Caroline makes Colin promise to return. Colin and Mary return to their hotel and make love passionately for days, not wishing to see Robert and Caroline again. Mary tells Colin she was shown a photograph of him taken covertly by Robert, and Colin tells her how Robert punched him in the stomach. 

They go to the beach on the Lido, past one of the old immense hotels that figure prominently in Mann’s Death in Venice. Trying to get back to their hotel, they find themselves across the canal from Robert’s house and when Caroline sees them and calls to them from her balcony, Colin and Mary reluctantly go across to the house. It is there that the strange, ritualistic murder of Colin takes place in front of a drugged Mary. It is both shocking and rather predictable. In such an unreal setting, nothing can quite seem too outlandish. 

In his New York Times review of the novel, John Leonard remarked that its story had already been told, and better, by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. The film reminded me more, however, of Nicolas Roeg’s cult horror film Don’t Look Now, also set in Venice and which also climaxes with the male protagonist having his throat slashed, but by a dwarf with a meat cleaver. The script was written by Harold Pinter, and he concentrates on Robert’s many speeches, which always sound like he composed them long ago and simply repeats them to everyone he meets. Christopher Walken is Robert. In the book he is “a squat man,” dark, sinister: 

He was shorter than Colin, but his arms were exceptionally long and muscular. His hands too were large, the backs covered with matted hair. He wore a tight-fitting black shirt, of an artificial, semi-transparent material, unbuttoned in a neat V almost to his waist. On a chain round his neck hung a gold imitation razorblade which lay slightly askew on the thick pelt of chest hair. Over his shoulder he carried a camera. A cloying sweet scent of aftershave filled the narrow street. 

Walken, who can’t help being mesmerizing, makes Robert blonde and much more attractive, even affable, than the character in the book. He’s a man who is convinced that he can’t explain the details of his life (or justify himself) without going back to the beginning, and telling the same story in the same words over and over. Walken is splendid, but quite miscast. 

So, in her own way, is Helen Mirren as Robert’s Canadian wife, Caroline. She is one half of the sado-masochistic couple, the one who submits to Robert’s brutality because she learns to accept it as what was somehow coming to her. But she was injured so badly by him they had to find another subject for the infliction of Robert’s murderous sadism. They happen on Colin, and, as the many photographs they have covertly taken of him reveal, they chose him as their next victim. Mirren has acted with power before (she played Queen Elizabeth), but here she is powerless, yielding, voluntarily helpless before Robert’s brutal dominance. 

Natasha Richardson is Mary. As impossible as it is to see her and especially to hear her without thinking of her glorious mother (Vanessa Redgrave), she is an undeniably lovely and grounding presence in the film. In the book, Colin has the curls in his hair. Mary does in the film, and Natasha Richardson’s golden ringlets seem to be unnaturally constant. 

Rupert Everett’s physical beauty is remarked on too often in the film. There are moments when he reminds one of a face and figure from a Renaissance painting, but I think he looks uncannily like he stepped out of an Egon Schiele portrait. Too modern for Raphael. 

Then there is the fifth element of the film, Venice, the most magnificent stage set in the world, against which so many writers have enacted their tales – tragedies (mostly). The film’s DP, Dante Spinotti, manages to wring several fresh views from some of the most well known scenery in the world.  

Even fans of Paul Schrader must admit that he has had a spotty career as a director. If I remember correctly, I liked his first film, Blue Collar. But since then, the only film to his credit as a director that I liked was Affliction, despite the silly “moral” tacked on to the ending. 

The final scenes of The Comfort of Strangers, including the climax, were changed in the film: in McEwan, after Caroline rouges Colin’s lips with blood from her own bloodied lip, Robert, holding Colin by the throat, kisses him passionately, then he slashes Colin’s wrist, not his throat. Mary remains paralyzed while Robert and Caroline move their luggage, stepping through the large pool of blood surrounding Colin. And in the book Mary doesn’t see Caroline in the police station, nor are we shown part of Robert’s interrogation or his final speech, repeating the film’s opening speech, “My father was a very big man... ” Despite its miscalculations, The Comfort of Strangers is a film well worth watching.