The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)

Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers

Cast: Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson, Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Manfredi Aliquo, David Ford, Daniel Franco, Rossana Canghiari, Fabrizio Sergenti Castellani, Mario Cotone, Giancarlo Previati, Antonio Serrano. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Dante Spinotti. Production design: Gianni Quaranta. Film editing: Bill Pankow. Music: Angelo Badalamenti. 

Like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers exploits the enclosed and labyrinthine character of Venice for sinister potential, but unlike Roeg, Schrader and screenwriter Harold Pinter, following Ian McEwan's book, make the city into a place where psychosis and not the supernatural seems to flourish. It was probably the wrong place for a handsome young couple like Colin (Rupert Everett) and Mary (Natasha Richardson) to come to, as they say, "work on their relationship." She is the divorced mother of two small children, an actress who does voiceover work for commercials; he's apparently some kind of editor, for he sometimes fiddles around with a manuscript that he proclaims "unreadable." But what matters more than what they do is how they look: They're quite beautiful. And that attracts the notice of Robert (Christopher Walken), a bar owner who surreptitiously photographs them and, we later learn, takes the pictures back to his opulent flat to show his disabled wife, Caroline (Helen Mirren). Eventually, Robert lures Colin and Mary to his bar, where he tells them stories of his past, of his cruel, overbearing father. Colin and Mary get lost on the way back to their hotel, and an exhausted (and perhaps drugged) Mary collapses, so they spend the night huddled in an alley. The next day, they agree that Robert is not someone they want to spend a lot of time with, but nevertheless he manages to find them and invite them to his apartment to meet his wife. The spider has lured them to his web. Eventually, we will learn that Robert is a psychopath and that his relationship with Caroline is sadomasochistic. That fact makes the emotional and sexual vulnerability of Colin and Mary more acute. This is one of those instances where the casting of an actor, namely Everett, inevitably adds a layer of significance to the character he's playing. Everett had come out as gay only the year before The Comfort of Strangers was made, and it's almost too easy to read this aspect of the actor's real life into his art. When we first meet Colin and Mary there's an element of sexual tension between them: They are sleeping in separate beds in their hotel room, and at one point she says that what he really needs is more sex. Later, after their encounter with Robert and Caroline has released something in them, Colin and Mary have passionate sex, but at one point he admits that he has always wondered what it's like to be the woman during sex. Robert, meanwhile, accuses Colin of being a "communist poof," and later tells him that he has told the men in the bar that Colin is his lover. I can't help feeling that Schrader has exploited Everett's real-life sexuality in the film, and Everett himself has notoriously advised gay actors not to come out of the closet if they want major careers -- his own hit the skids not long after the release of The Comfort of Strangers. Setting that aside, the film is opulently staged and filmed, well acted, and Schrader sets up the revelations of its plot and characters skillfully. But there's also something airless and perfunctory about it. I don't know enough about Colin and Mary to feel a sense of violation at what happens to them, to regard it as more than just formulaic psychological thriller stuff.  

Stage Beauty (Richard Eyre, 2004)

It's a measure of how the discourse on sexual identity has changed over the past 12 years that Stage Beauty, in which it is a central theme, seems now to have missed the mark completely. Billy Crudup, an actor who should be a bigger star than he is, plays Edward Kynaston, an actor in Restoration London who was noted for his work in female roles at a time when such parts were usually still played by boys and men. Kynaston, as the film tells us, was praised by the diarist Samuel Pepys as "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life." As the film begins, he is performing as Desdemona in a production of Othello, and is aided by a dresser, Maria (Claire Danes), who longs to act. After his performance ends, she borrows his wig, clothes, and props, and performs in a local tavern as "Margaret Hughes." When King Charles II (Rupert Everett) lifts the ban on women appearing on stage, Kynaston not only finds his career threatened, but when the king's mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoë Tapper), overhears him fulminating about the inadequacy of actresses, she persuades the king to forbid men from playing women's roles: The king gives as his reason that it encourages "sodomy." Although the actual Kynaston performed male as well as female roles, in the film he is stymied by an inability to act male parts. Eventually, Maria, who is having trouble with her own new career, calls upon Kynaston to coach her in his most famous role, Desdemona, while at the same time teaching him how to act like a man on stage. Together, they appear as Othello and Desdemona and, with a violently naturalistic performance of the death scene, bring down the house. The premise, taken from a play by Jeffrey Hatcher, who also wrote the screenplay, allows for some insight into the nature of gender, but the film never approaches it satisfactorily. Instead, we have a conventional ending that suggests not only that Kynaston and Hughes revolutionized acting with less stylized performance -- something that certainly didn't occur in the classically oriented Restoration theater -- but also that they fell in love. Earlier in the film, Kynaston is shown in a same-sex relationship with George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), who leaves him to get married. The film never quite resolves whether Kynaston is gay, bi, sexually fluid, or simply somehow confused by having been celebrated as a beautiful woman. And while it's risky to apply 21st-century psychology to 17th-century sexual mores, Stage Beauty's indifference to historical accuracy seems to demand that it do so. As unsatisfactory a film as it is, Stage Beauty has a few things to recommend it, starting with Crudup's fine performance. Danes is hindered by a screenplay that never concentrates on her character long enough to bring it into focus, but she and Crudup have strong chemistry together. And the supporting cast includes such British acting stalwarts as Everett, Chaplin, Tom Wilkinson, Richard Griffiths, and Edward Fox, as well as Hugh Bonneville, now best known for Downton Abbey, as Pepys. It's startling to see Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, peering out from beneath a Restoration periwig.