The Comfort of Strangers - 1990 film review

The ingredients of The Comfort of Strangers are top-notch. The screenplay is based on a novel by Ian McEwan and written by Harold Pinter. The director is Paul Schrader. The cast is headed by two couples, Colin and Mary, played by Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett, and Robert and Caroline, played by Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren respectively. The setting is Venice, at its most beautiful and mysterious. What more could one want? Well, perhaps a greater sense of satisfaction at the end...

There's a creepiness about the story that is very typical of McEwan's early work. I can well remember, as a student, haunting Blackwell's Paperback Shop on Broad Street in Oxford, and studying the latest books intensively, while wondering if a novel of mine would ever appear on those shelves (I'm happy to report that, many years later, I did see my own books in the shop, although alas it bit the dust quite a long time ago). Picador paperbacks I found very enticing, but I didn't have the funds to buy more than one. The book I chose was McEwan's collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites. And very macabre some of those stories were, too. He wrote them as part of his literary apprenticeship, but they do show his talent quite clearly.

So he's a writer I've long admired, even though I've not read the book on which this film is based, and I'm not sure about how much it differs. This is a slow-moving movie, and the lack of pace that, on the page, may serve to build menace and tension, seems a little overdone. Colin and Mary are a very attractive couple, but they have a relationship that is slightly fraught, partly because Mary seems rather naive, partly because Colin is uninterested in her children from a previous relationship.

Someone is taking photographs of them without their knowledge. Why? And why is a rather strange man (Robert) taking such an interest in them? It takes a long time - too long, I'd say - for the answers to become clear, and towards the end, there's an act of shocking violence that I'm not sure is adequately foreshadowed. Nor was I convinced by the final scene. But it's a thought-provoking film. Unsatisfactory in some respects, but interesting nonetheless.