The Comfort of Strangers

Aside from his notable scripts for Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ), I was a big fan of Paul Schrader’s first directorial effort, Blue Collar, and have followed his career thereafter, with particular notice of Hardcore, Mishima, Patty Hearst, Light Sleeper, and Affliction. In The Comfort of Strangers, he works from a script by Harold Pinter adapted from a novel by Ian McEwen, starring Natasha Richardson (intriguingly reminiscent of her mother -- Vanessa Redgrave), Rupert Everett, Christopher Walken, and Helen Mirren, with the exquisitely photographed setting of Venice. So how do all these elements of quality add up to so bad a film? And why do so many of the Fellow’s Favorite films selected by visiting art scholars at the Clark turn out to be dis-favorites of mine? Rhetorical questions I don’t intend to answer. Suffice it to say that this is a film you will love or you will hate, and I incline toward the latter. (1990, dvd@cai, n.) *4*