Young director with a Ballard future

Insight on the News, Feb 4, 2002 by Rex Roberts

Two very different books by J.G. Ballard have been turned into movies: The Empire of the Sun, directed by Steven Spielberg, recounts the author's boyhood in Shanghai during the Second War World and his internment in a prison camp in Japan; the autoerotic Crash, directed by David Cronenberg, explores the dysfunctional but seductive relationship between people and technology.

Neither movie captures Ballard's sensibility nearly so well as The Business of Strangers, the debut film written and directed by Patrick Stettner. Set at an airport hotel during a 12-hour layover, the film relates a brief encounter between two women, one a successful corporate executive, the other a young assistant, who despite their different stations in life are drawn to each other. Like Ballard, Stettner is fascinated by power, sex and violence, and The Business of Strangers is highly charged on all three counts.

"I was very interested in exploring how power was a central theme for the characters," says Stettner, a recent graduate of Columbia University's film school. "Power manifested through gender, economics, class, youth and sexual prowess ... each character's ability to control the situation and how they perceived their authority in relation to one another."

In the film, Julie Styron (Stockard Channing) believes she's about to be fired from a company whose ladder she's climbed at great sacrifice to her personal life. She botches a sales pitch and blames her assistant, Paula Murphy (Julia Stiles), who has arrived late with presentation materials. Julie fires Paula on the spot. Later, having discovered she's been promoted, she offers to buy Paula a conciliatory drink at the hotel bar.

The two women begin to talk, and Julie, lonely and insecure beneath her tough-gal exterior, becomes fascinated with her brash, overtly erotic, vaguely sinister companion. Paula, in turn -- acting the part of the villainous therapist -- lures Julie on a drug-fueled adventure that turns violent, convincing her boss that a bit of malicious mischief is exactly what she needs to feel alive again. The Business of Strangers lures the viewer into a mendacious labyrinth eerily akin to those in Super-Cannes and Cocaine Nights.

"For me, airport hotels are a strange no-man's land, a transitory island, contained and controlled in a biosphere of sorts," says Stettner, sounding very Ballardian. "It's a place where travelers have the illusion of total anonymity with the confidence that any social contact is only momentary, allowing them to do things they normally wouldn't."

The Business of Strangers, released late last year, still is in theaters, but some viewers may have to wait for the video. In the meantime, the rare producer with a taste for Ballard might want to put a call in to Stettner: He seems the perfect choice to direct an adaptation of Super-Cannes.