The Comfort of Strangers

National Review, May 27, 1991 by John Simon

When Colin and Mary are on their second holiday in Venice in two or three years, Colin proposes to Mary. Will she marry him? "Yes, but we don't have to commit ourselves to all that," she replies. "I mean, it's been such a lovely day." Actually, it hasn't been all that lovely; but, in any case, what has the loveliness of the day to do with committing oneself or not? Nothing; but then, not much else in The Comfort of Strangers makes much sense. After all, the screenplay is by Harold Pinter, and the direction by Paul Schrader.

Colin is in a profession having to do with books; at any rate, he has brought along a book-length manuscript that he hates. Mary, who has two small children by another man back home in England, used to be an actress in an all-female theater company, but now mostly does TV commercials. Trivial conversation is to them what cud is to cows: they chew endlessly on Mary's having unwittingly agreed to her ostracism by a bunch of coevals when she was eight or nine (something that still horribly preys on her mind) or on whether Colin Really likes children--either Mary's in particular or, more existentially, children in general. Any topic is good for at least twenty lines of laconic but obsessive, cryptic and vaguely unsettling, dialogue.

However, their best subject is sex. They practice it avidly, sometimes not leaving their hotel room for a whole day while they service each other, and room service services them. But they talk it as greedily as they perform it. Colin proposes to build a machine with all sorts of attachments and gizmos, and a low but steady hum, into which he would strap Mary; it would f-- her "not just for hours and days, but for years and years and years." (A steal from Alfred Jarry, but never mind.) Her fantasy is even more winsome. She would find herself a handsome surgeon who would cut off Colin's arms and legs, the rest of him to be kept in her bedroom in perpetuity, to perform pretty much they way the aforesaid machine would. Mary is evidently a Luddite at heart, but a generous one: "And sometimes," she adds, "I would lend you to my girlfriends."

When our couple returns very late one night from Murano, where they have watched glass being blown for hours (even the glass in this movie is insatiable), the hotel restaurant is closed, like all other eateries around. (What about room service? Don't look for consistency in Pinter.) The concierge directs them to an allegedly easy-to-find all-night joint not too far away. They wander through nocturnal Venice for what seems like forever (to us even more than to them), lost until an obliging Italian stranger pops up out of nowhere in a gorgeous white suit and offers to lead them to some splendid food.

But before I advert to the food, I must tell you about his even more splendid suit with wide, pointy lapels, worn with a white shirt and a black necktie patterned with bold rhomboid white squiggles. The clothes, you see, are by Giorgio Armani, by George! His name, in huge print, is announced on a title card during the opening credits--far more prominently than the names of other, humbler collaborators on the film. And rightly so, as the Armanis, for men and women, very nearly eclipse the lesser beauties of Venice--art, architecture, canals, etc.--caressingly photographed by Dante Spinotti in a kind of visual terza rima, even as the insufferably tutti-frutti music of Angelo Badalamenti contributes bad elements of its own.

Well now, back to that stranger and the sleek dive he takes our couple to. (Not so much sleek, perhaps, as louche.) The cook, it seems is sick, and, no one else being able to whip up a bit of pasta, Robert, as the stranger is called, plies Mary and Colin with a red wine he claims to be highly nutritive. After they've had their fill of wine, Robert entertains them with stories about his father--a real man, not like today's ambiguous lot. Out of sheer masculinity, Papa would dye his superb black mustache, when it began to go grey, back to its former virility with a mascara brush. We were treated to this piece of vital information by an unidentified, disembodied and incongruous, voice (Robert's) at the start of the film; Robert will repeat it a couple of more times, including at film's end. Papa was a terror to his wife, four daughters, and son Robert, all of whom, when he saw fit, he beat with a thick leather strap.

Robert offers this, and more like it, as answer to the question about how he met Caroline, his Canadian wife. The connection remains hazy, although much later, when the equally weird Caroline reveals that she and Robert practice kinky sex, we may infer some nexus with that paternal belt. This sex, as we gather, is the much-delayed cause of Caroline's occasional painful contractions and contortions: "It hurts when I laugh," she explains. But since life in Robert and Caroline's spectacular apartment (a major palazzo with museum-worthy Renaissance furniture as well as--somewhat inappropriately--English Pre-Raphaelite paintings) offers precious few laughs, the postcoital pain may be bearable. As for the coital one, Caroline explains to the puzzled Mary how she came to love it.