MOVIE REVIEW : A Pinteresque ‘Comfort of Strangers’

“The Comfort of Strangers” (AMC Century 14) is a movie about seduction: evil seduction. Set in a Venice of pristine city and seascapes, picture-postcard views tinged with dread, it’s a psychological tale where all the sexual currents have vile undercurrents, where people seem to be doing bad, perverse things just out of view.

Harold Pinter’s script is based on a novel by Ian McEwan, yet, though it’s a fairly faithful adaptation, the whole movie now seems pure Pinter. It’s oblique, breathing with threat and innuendo, done in a style full of elegant repression. One couple (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), on holiday trying to recover lost romance--are pawns of another: jaded aristocrats Robert and Caroline (Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren), who seem to be toying with them, reeling them in lazily, inexorably.

The film juxtaposes the story with repeated embarrassing revelations of Robert’s family life, and views of his milieu: a gay bar which he euphemistically calls a restaurant, and his austere, glowing palazzo, shared with Caroline.

The younger couple, in a way are idealists; the older couple, sensual hedonists in a stripped-down world, clearly have no ideals at all. Robert, a cruel but considerate homophobe and reactionary, is a neatly wrapped monster. He taunts Colin as a “Communist poof.” Yet, their amorality may act as an aphrodisiac. When Mary and Colin meet them, sexual barriers are unlocked; they become ravenous. What Robert and Caroline are after is obscure, though, gradually, like menacing obsidian emerging from fog, it appears that they want total control of the couple. They want to drive a wedge in, they want to possess . . . something.

“The Comfort of Strangers” is one of those movies that seems perfect--cuttingly written, visualized and immaculately performed by all--but which somehow doesn’t expand afterwards. There’s a hollow feel to it, like a maze without a center. I suspect many audiences may dislike or dismiss it, even though it’s hard to say how it could be improved.

It doesn’t have the dizzying vertiginous jaggedness of that other Venice thriller, “Don’t Look Now.” A director other than Paul Schrader might have juiced it up, made it more nightmarish. Schrader is a director who--as in his best previous movie, “Mishima”--works toward unlikely spiritual epiphanies. And “Comfort” is done in such distanced, tightly controlled style that even views of the canals and ocean seem dry, over-composed.

Yet, certainly, Christopher Walken’s corpse-like blond good looks and air of wistful, nonchalant sadism have rarely been more effective. And the superb Helen Mirren, as his wife, masters a wonderful hysterical smile and overfamiliar air that suggests a mine in a daisy field. As the younger couple, Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett are appropriately lithe and bewildered: Richardson’s sensitivity counterpointing Everett’s narcissism.

It’s possible that Pinter, long regarded as one of Britain’s pre-eminent playwrights, may be an even stronger screenwriter and that movies may be a better arena for him. On the stage, his spare, cryptic sentences often seem to float around in airless dread. In the movies, he’s worked best for directors--like Joseph Losey, Robert Altman or Karel Reisz--who counterpoint his spare dialogue with visuals or clutter, like the lushness of Venice here and the spooky resonance it sets up.

This thriller lacks the baroque bloodiness and raw, accumulating carnage audiences may now expect; as a drama, it often seems somewhat too studied and attenuated. Yet, “The Comfort of Strangers” (rated R, for sex, nudity, language and violence) has something: an eerie sense of the collision between human and inhuman values and responses, a sense of the fragile veneer sometimes underlying civilized behavior. At its best, it’s about madness disguised as utter rationalism, utter dispassion, noblesse oblige. As such, in odd moments, it chills through to the bone and beyond.

‘The Comfort of Strangers’

Christopher Walken: Robert

Natasha Richardson: Mary

Rupert Everett: Colin

Helen Mirren: Caroline

An Angelo Rizzoli presentation of an Erre production, released by Skouras Pictures. Director Paul Schrader. Producer Angelo Rizzoli. Executive producer Mario Cotone. Screenplay by Harold Pinter. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti. Editor Bill Pankow. Costumes Mariolina Bono. Music Angelo Badalamenti. Production design Gianni Quaranta. Set decorator Stefano Paltrinieri. Supervising Sound Editor Maurice Schell. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (sex, language, nudity, violence).