The Comfort of Strangers (1991)

Good idea lost in the noise

Charming and brutal

An absolute waste of money

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Yesterday (why?) The Comfort of Strangers seen again. A remarkable film , but not a good one. A couple on holiday in Venice to perpetuate their relationship met a brutal man and his enigmatic wife . Rupert Everett is the husband of the couple who made ​​more like his looks rather than his wife and certainly less put on her children . Natasha Richardson - his wife - doing a half-hearted attempt to deepen the relationship. There is no connection and no sex. Until they meet the character of Christopher Walken. Repel them are intrusive behavior and attracts them. Walken is the key to new passion ?The powerful memory I had of the film was in a scene where Walken gives Everett unprovoked a hard punch in the stomach. Everett responding (also) this lethargic . Walken gives him a wink after the stump. This scene is still the best of the film. Walken acts pleasant unfathomable. His expression is attractive false. Walken carries the film to pose. His character - despite bizarre stories about his past - is superficial . The rest of the cast ( Helen Mirren is Walkens woman ) seems to do exactly what the script is . No subtle additions in the game.Director Paul Schrader will have stood for. Schrader at the top of his fame during production was/is known for its powerplay. It has earned him eternal fame as a writer of the scrips Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. In The Comfort of Strangers, he 's tight rein. So tight that even particularly Everett Richardson and insecure on the set seem to be . "So, and not otherwise ," will have Schrader called . It provides for stiff game in a story of the subtleties must have correct.The result is that the crises of the couple does not last and that you wait until Walken again comes into picture. Stock photography Dante Spinotti is beautiful and the pleasant retro look back. The score of Angelo Badalamenti 's trying the audience's attention to keep. It does not help. The Comfort of Strangers in the year 2013 is just a nostalgic experience.Jac. de Wit, [email protected]

A first tier cast make it difficult to turn away from this erotic thriller even when the fate of the young lovers starts to unravel and the audience can clearly see that it is time to flee the beautifully filmed Venice half way through the film.Lovers not yet committed to marriage but clearly moving in that direction (the equally beautiful Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett) have returned to a Venice they have been enchanted with before for an extended vacation without her children. Director Schrader (rather better known as a screenwriter than a director despite the sure hand shown here) lets the audience in early in the film that someone is watching them - or more specifically Everett - for unrevealed reasons. The "photo from a different angle" gimmick almost leads us to expect a James-Bond-style action/spy thriller that never develops. What THE BIRTHDAY PARTY and THE CARETAKER playwright/screenwriter Harold Pinter has in mind is something much subtler.One late night when the pair becomes lost returning to their hotel, the natural tension of deserted streets in an exotic locale is ratcheted UP rather than relieved when the surface-suave Christopher Walken offers them the temporary "kindness of a stranger" in the shelter of a late night bar and some decidedly off-putting stories of his youth.This passing acquaintance grows in its dark over and undertones with a later invitation to his villa when Richardson appears ill when they next meet (an erotic high point at the villa) - an invitation which extends to dinner and the involvement of Walken's supposedly infirm wife (Mirren) who appears to hold a secret to the nature of her husband.Mr. Walken may, in fact, be physically incapable of playing a non-threatening character. This is a persona no innocent would turn to for help, and it works without any effort on actor or director's part to build the tension - possibly too well since, try as we may to find innocent explanations for the questions Pinter and Schrader raise, our suspicions make us less trusting than Richardson or Everett's characters - even before it is in the best interests of the film's developing story.Walken and Mirren's revelations late in the film justify the noir conclusion the audience has clearly seen coming for most of the film, and any audience well enough educated to be aware of the intimate relationship (however rightfully un-PC) of sex and violence dating back to the Roman Amphitheater will find no surprise or lack of credibility in the final denouement, but credibility does not necessarily equate to satisfaction. As polished and chilling as Schrader and Pinter's COMFORT OF STRANGERS is, it is not ultimately satisfying - but fans of the cast, the writer or director OR the City of Venice may well want to go back for second and third helpings for all are served well despite the curdled final curtain. But for the casting of Walken and the awkward play-out of the final scene, this may well be Pinter's best, subtlest work to date.Not satisfying by any means (as Harold Prince's far lighter but still commercially failed black comedy SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE with Angela Lansbury and Michael York is), but fascinating and well worth the sampling for what is there. It's a near miss to stand proudly with director Schrader's earlier best work on American GIGOLO - from his own screenplay.

"The Comfort of Strangers" sounds superb on paper. Ian McEwan's brilliantly devastating and profoundly disturbing novella adapted by the genius that is Harold Pinter, directed by the excellent Paul Schrader, scored by Angelo Badalamenti, and starring what is essentially a dream cast absolutely perfect for the material. Yet it has a mediocre reputation at best so when I settled down for the viewing I was hopeful but had low expectations.Pinter and Schrader handled two things poorly here- the ending, and the introduction of Christopher Walken's character, Robert. I'm not usually too concerned with faithfulness to the source material but what McEwan did with both aspects in the novella definitely did not require any sort of alteration. McEwan plays with the comfort level of the audience and characters more than Pinter does, causing the story to be even more sinister and disturbing as it develops. Pinter begins the film with a voice-over narration by Robert and we see Robert in flashes well before meets Colin and Mary and takes them to his bar. In short, we are told explicitly that Robert is a villain from the opening of the film, and Pinter also lets him take a bit too much screen time away from Colin and Mary. Walken is excellent in the role, however. The ending, while disturbing and unforgettable in the novella, is a predictable and simple conclusion on film. There's also one or two things that happened during the climactic scene that don't make sense at all within the narrative of the film and which did make sense in McEwan's book. Another questionable alteration.Other than those faults "The Comfort of Strangers" is an absolutely tremendous and amazingly involving film with a brilliant script by Pinter which allows for more nuanced characters and a different approach than McEwan's novella featured, and superb work by Paul Schrader as director, who uses Venice brilliantly her to create mood and ambiance and certainly shoots the film very, very well, with one scene, where Robert is discussing his relationship with his father and sisters with Colin and Mary in the bar which is shot stunningly well. I won't give away Schrader's use of imagery here but it is such a well-crafted scene that the version in my head of the scene seemed terrible in comparison. The film is also shot exceptionally well by Dante Spinotti, a quality cinematographer famed for his work on films like "Heat" and "L.A. Confidential" among others. Complimenting Schrader's work, which is probably his most impressive outside "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters", and at times superior to that, is one of Angelo Badalamenti's most memorable and distinctive scores. I actually had Rupert Everett in mind for Colin well before I even knew this film existed and he didn't disappoint at all in the role. Natasha Richardson was out of left field for me but the casting worked spectacularly well here, and it goes without saying that Helen Mirren is superb as Robert's wife Caroline. Mirren's Canadian accent is spot-on as well. "The Comfort of Strangers" is significantly less heady than its prose version, choosing to function as a thriller with some thematic preoccupations instead. What is surprising about this film is just how well it works as a thriller. The novella thrives on an atmosphere of tense, sinister unease but much of that is derived from Colin and Mary's relationship rather than any plot mechanics. This film is more a traditional thriller but it is tremendously tense, involving, and exciting from start to finish. A quality film, one of Schrader's best as director and some of Pinter's finest film work.9/10

This is one of those movies like "Mommie Dearest" that, after the first viewing, you're not sure that you could have possibly seen what you think you saw. It's so over the top that you need to shower afterward. And then, for some twisted reason, you watch it again and you start to like it. Everything about it is preposterous (though, Venice looks cool). Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett play, perhaps, the dullest couple to ever grace the screen. It is impossible to care about, or even understand, the emotional quandary they're going through. Helen Mirren is completely insane, but nothing can prepare you for the vintage, bravura Walken performance. His monologue about his father (that he delivers more than once in a dubious Italian accent) is a zenith in the Hammy Hall of Fame. Seek out someone else that has seen it and recite that monologue to each other in a bad Italian dialect and you will seldom in your life laugh harder. Rent (or buy, as I have) quickly and brace yourself.