Tag: Christopher Walken

The Comfort of Strangers

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s a profusion of talent: Paul Schrader directs a script penned by Harold Pinter, based on a novella written by Ian McEwan. The stellar cast includes Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Natasha Richardson and Everett. The sound score was created by David Lynch’s regular Angelo Badalamenti. To boot, the cinematography is signed by Dante Spinotti, who would go on to work on Michael Mann’s Heat and The Insider (1995 and 1999). Now you can catch the outcome on a shining Blu-ray reissue.

What could rightly have been a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth is instead a glorious atmospheric mystery, teeming with malice. If “foreigners in Venice getting more than they bargained for” was a subgenre with Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg) and Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971) as its most recognisable champions, then The Comfort of Strangers would sit triumphantly next to them. This is a Venice drenched in decaying sunlight, internecine shadows and crooked buildings.

The plot is quite straightforward. A couple, Colin and Mary (Everett and Richardson) go to Venice in the hope of adding some spice into their hackneyed relationship. One late evening as they are seeking a snack, they bump into Robert (Walken), who invites them to his restaurant/bar. Later, they end up sleeping in his apartment overlooking the city, where they meet his strange and angst-ridden wife Caroline (Mirren). Robert circles the two visitors by stalking them and making up excuses to meet, always aided by his loyal and mostly housebound Caroline.

Walken’s performance is responsible for the film’s sense of mystery. Obsessed with his father, he repeats a strange monologue about his old man three times. He frequently mentions twhere his father and grandfather were buried. His apartment is littered with antique. Walken imbues his characters with a lingering sense of malice. He is charming, yet dangerous. He regards himself as intellectually superior, and therefore entitled to horrific deeds, expressed mostly through his obsessive relationship with the past.

His presence and patriarchal attitude towards both his wife and the visiting couple are stultifying. The collapse of the traditional power structures could trigger violence. Frustrated at his lack of influence in the modern world, he lashes out at whoever he can still hurt. He has contradictory feelings about sexuality. He expresses his profound hate of his homosexual tendencies at dinner, and yet seems to be entirely comfortable at the local gay bar.

The final denouement is very abrupt, borderline anti-climactic. The Comfort of Strangers sustains a remarkable sense of brooding evil throughout. The superb cinematography and art direction lend a helping hand: the contours of Venice with its never-ending alleyways and dark corners envelop and confound our protagonists. At one point, Robert gazes at people under a smoky neon-green light as he explains his relationship to his father to the couple. These visuals are repeated throughput the film, and they play a fundamental role in fleshing out our the creepy protagonist.

Pinter’s script is deeply cinematic, in no way inferior to his other films. He’s now firmly established as one of the most influential British playwrights of the last century. The director Schrader, on the other hand, has often received a bum rap from film critics. At times, he deserved it, as with the disjointed and lame The Canyons (2013). This is not the case with The Comfort of Strangers, which is on a par with the Marxist masterpiece Blue Collar (1978), the exquisite horror Cat People (1982) and the reflection on existentialism First Reformed (2017).

It’s lamentable that The Comfort of Strangers has been overlooked for nearly three decades, as it only achieved very limited distribution. Thankfully, the time to fix this has come. A dual-format reedition of the film is out on Monday, September 24th. The special features is a brand new commentary by Paul Schrader, recorded just last month exclusively for the BFI, and cinematographer Dante Spinotti has specially written a piece for the accompanying booklet.

The year of 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harold Pinter, one of the most important and influential British playwrights of the last century.

The Deer Hunter

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Russian roulette. You put a bullet in the chamber of a revolver. You spin the chamber. You put the barrel to your head and pull the trigger. The chance is one in six you shoot yourself. Theoretically, the chamber containing the bullet is the heaviest, so that sinks to the bottom and you’re emptying an already empty chamber. But that’s not always the case. Also, if the spin is arbitrarily stopped, your chance is definitely one in six.

Russian roulette is about as dirty a pastime as you can imagine. Especially if players are not taking part of their own free will and if spectators are gambling money on the game. Games in which the participants are gambling their very lives.

Games of Russian roulette take centre stage in The Deer Hunter and function as its central metaphor. It’s a series of snapshots from the lives of a group of Pennsylvania steelworkers who enlist in the Vietnam War.

In the first hour, Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage) leave their factory workplace and, prior to shipping out to ‘nam, they attend Steven’s wedding and party then go on a deer hunting trip.

Surprisingly, the wedding party seems to take up the best part of the first hour. It’s unclear how much is scripted and how much improvised but Cimino is clearly fascinated by setting up such scenes for the camera and letting them play out with actors. These scenes feel at once well prepared and open to anything that happens on camera, lending them a convincing realism.

If both wedding party and deer hunt showcase a degree of male horseplay, the hunt also hones an aspect of Michael/De Niro who by the end of the film has emerged as its main protagonist. As far as the hunt goes, Michael takes only one of his friends seriously: Nick. Certainly not Stan (John Cazale) who wants to borrow Michael’s spare pair of boots having forgotten to bring his own.

Even so, Michael goes off on his own to hunt and shoot a deer, determined to do so with a single shot. And he succeeds. The single shot anticipates the subsequent Russian roulette where a single shot decides a participant’s fate.

About an hour and 10 minutes in, just when you’re wondering why anyone should refer to this as a war film aside from its young men about to go to war theme, an edit abruptly cuts to the Vietnam War. Michael is lying hidden in the dirt as an enemy soldier opens a trap door hiding terrified villagers and tosses in a grenade. At once shrewd and possessed of a righteous indignation, Michael is soon wielding a flamethrower against the enemy. After which the rest of his unit, including Nick and Steven, show up.

Another cut and the three are held prisoner waist deep in water below a bamboo hut on stilts above a river. Steven is not coping well. In the hut above, other prisoners play Russian roulette at gunpoint for their captors’ amusement and gambling bets. Keeping his head, Michael devises a plan to get three bullets put into the revolver for the game as the trios only possible hope of escape.

In line with De Niro’s physicality and commanding presence – he’d already played three of his great Scorsese roles Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) and New York, New York (1977) plus Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II (1974) – he does indeed break the trio out in a tense escape sequence.

In the 1970s, a new De Niro film was a cultural event. He articulated the emotional arc of a generation and you had to see it, at least if you were male. This ceased to be the case somewhere in the 1980s. It’s hard to think of an actor (male or female) since for whom this is true to the same degree.

Michael/De Niro takes centre stage in further sequences in Saigon and Pittsburg. Nick disappears into Saigon’s dangerous and shady Russian roulette gambling netherworld under the patronage of a mysterious, enigmatic French promoter (real life Bangkok restaurateur Pierre Segui) while Steven has been reduced to life in a wheelchair in a military nursing home. Peter Zinner’s groundbreaking editing means that Nick/Walken’s slow personality disintegration is fed to us in devastatingly effective bursts.

A Pittsburgh subplot also develops Nick’s girlfriend who becomes involved with Michael when he returns but Nick does not. She’s brilliantly played by Meryl Streep who turns a minor bit part into something very special indeed.

Russian roulette not only causes Steven’s trauma and Nick’s disappearance but also affects Michael’s attitude to the world around him. Back in Pittsburgh, he avoids a ‘welcome home’ party. He goes hunting again but can’t bring himself to shoot a deer. He’s clearly not the “man” he once was. Whether this is good or bad is open to debate – perhaps that’s part of what makes this such a great film.

The lethal game provides a wider metaphor too. The war kills and damages people at random. But perhaps life as a steel mill worker isn’t so good either, otherwise why would enlisting in a war seem such a good idea? Michael talks about shooting the deer with “only one shot”, but in the Russian roulette scenes “only one shot” keeps coming again and again until it kills someone. War is about lots of “only one shot”s one after another. It’s also the case in a wider sense, outside the war context, that you only get one shot at life but life can take as many shots as it wants at you and any one of them could prove fatal.

It may be 40 years old and ostensibly about the Vietnam War, but The Deer Hunter actually tackles deeper issues – not only how the horror of war changes people but also how people deal with their lot in life generally. Made in 1978, it looks as fresh today as it did on its original release. A beautifully judged, dirty masterpiece.

The Deer Hunter is back out in the UK in a 4K restoration on Wednesday, July 4th. Watch the film trailer below: