Welcome to I Like To Watch 👁👅👁, a series where I bring you films/episodes/other content from the thirsty canon. They’ll titillate, they’ll inspire debate, they’ll show up in your fantasies years later.
The Comfort Of Strangers (1990), currently streaming on the Criterion Channel’s app, is a sumptuous, watery erotic thriller set in Venice. As our leading couple wanders cobblestone streets, buys postcards, and sleeps in separate twin beds, they also face a classic white, upper-middle class, over-educated problem in their relationship — do we even like each other? But before they get a chance to answer, Christopher Walken appears from behind a Tuscan column to beckon them into a sinister sexual underworld. Sign. Me. Up.
Based on an Ian McEwan book adapted by Harold Pinter and directed by Paul Schrader, the film is a perfect storm of the artistic male gaze escalated to the moon (or a vomitorium?). To me, the hallmark of a Male Gaze movie is one where the trailer presents Christopher Walken lurking in the shadows, and claims, in bold VO, that “nothing is as it seems.” Uhhh… I don’t know, guys! Seems not great!
Director Paul Schrader backs me up on the morbid milieu of male vibes in an interview he gave about the film. In his words:
There was Ian McEwan’s theme, which is that ‘men and women are inherently incompatible and no amount of socialization can paper this over.’ And then there was Harold Pinter’s theme, which was ‘language is a tool we use not to communicate.’
However much the citizens of Schrader’s world fail to communicate, the film itself asks the important questions. Chief among them: if Christopher Walken stalked you through the dark streets of Venice to corral you into a wife-swapping scenario, how long would you sit through his story about shitting his pants before finally overcoming your British politeness to excuse yourself from the conversation and run promptly in the opposite direction?
The answer for our protagonists, played by Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson, is never. But they do spend a lot of time sauntering the spooky streets and canals of Venice with knit brows and bitten lips.
Back to Schrader:
There was one mistake in the script that I had to address. In the book, you had this couple making love in their room for two days. It wasn’t in the script. There was no actual fucking. So I said to Harold, ‘I can’t say these people are fucking for two straight days and not actually show them fucking. I need you to write the scene.’ I sent him that message a couple of times and I never got the scene. So then I sat down and wrote the scene. And within about 20 minutes the fax started up. And he had re-written my scene.
Aside from showing some nice moonlit ear licking, the film also invites you to question the foundation of the erotic thriller genre — why is it that people (especially men) find sexuality so terrifying? Is it because they fear retribution for the ways they’ve wielded their own male gaze? Is it because any form of desire aberrant from the vanilla, hetero status quo has the ability to become so consuming that it leads you to dark places — like ensnaring a young couple of tourists into matching kaftans in your palatial apartment? Or does the fear rest on the idea that sexual fluidity is as unstable and unknowable as the Venice canals, and if you get too close it might just slit your throat? Or make you listen to long, surreal, graphic stories about its dad?
Natasha Richardson’s character faces a whole different kind of terror — the terror of rejection. The more love she expresses for her children, the more she bores and repels her posh boyfriend. But as they find themselves in one pickle after another on the mean streets of Venice, he starts to fancy her again. You can see her longing to be desired, and understanding the only way to do so is to proceed into one dangerous predicament after another. Call me crazy, but I don’t think women need to repeatedly land themselves in hostage scenarios just to hold the attention of their lovers! But the erotic thriller shows us the fear that lies at the intersection of desperation and insatiability. Of being conditioned to want something so badly that when you finally get it it consumes you and silences your rational mind.
Come for our leading lady wearing slip dresses with belts, stay for the mildly offensive BDSM allusions, Walken sucker punches, and the suggestion that non-monogamy is kind of a cult. Listen… if dads went to therapy? We wouldn’t have sumptuous erotic thrillers like this.
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