BUY TICKETS HERE
Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28, for a screening of director Paul Schrader’s psychosexual thriller “The Comfort of Strangers.”
Adapting the acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan, playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter lends his trademark unnerving dialogue and air of creeping menace to this spellbinding study of power, control, and the frighteningly thin line between pleasure and pain.
Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are the prey, a beautiful British couple working on their relationship while on holiday in Venice; Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren are the hunters who draw them into the sinister web of their opulent, old-world palazzo.
What plays out is an unsettling, sadomasochistic seduction imbued with an atmosphere of sumptuous dread by the elegantly gliding tracking shots of cinematographer Dante Spinotti, lush score by Angelo Badalamenti, and carefully controlled direction of Paul Schrader, who choreographs a mesmerizing pas de quatre of sustained erotic and emotional tension.
“Paul Schrader’s “Comfort of Strangers” is about decadence in Venice, a place of long golden afternoons, steamy nights, grand palazzos, dark alleys, incredible beauty, unrecognized malignancies and, finally, death.
“The movie is too much, which is just about right for a horror film so romantic that its true nature is only revealed at the very end, when escape is no longer possible.
“Harold Pinter, who adapted the screenplay from Ian McEwan’s novel, has never written a film as alarmingly ghoulish as this tale of terminal love. “The Comfort of Strangers” is a Grand Guignol variation on the kind of scary Pinter play in which the menace remains discreet. Not here.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times
Tickets are $6 and available at the link above. Students use code STUDENT at checkout for free admission (must show Cane card at the door).
