‘Venetian text’ and aesthetics of reflections in Paul Schrader's ‘The comfort of strangers’ based on the novel by Ian McEwan

The paper addresses aesthetics of reflections in the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The Comfort of Strangers by the director and film theorist Paul Schrader. First, it argues the so-called ‘Venetian text’ to be extremely potent for the ‘transcendental style’ glimmering, transgression, and reflections. In texts created by the novelist McEwan, the script-writer Pinter, and the director Schrader, there are notable references to novels and films set in Venice (Mann, Du Maurier, Roeg, Visconti) and their well-known thematic and visual leitmotifs. Furthermore, aesthetics of reflections accompanies the phantasmal imagery of The Comfort of Strangers, which problematizes the borders between visual (aesthetisized) and erotic destructive (selfdestructive) experience. In this respect, repetitive optical images, photographs, mirroring surfaces are as curious as the very showing of the process of taking pictures, voyeuristic practices on screen, and observations about enjoyment as an effect of male gaze. Moreover, there are mirroring episodes in which the characters confess about their wish to watch their beloved experiencing some kind of corporeal transgression. All in all, the ‘transcendental style’ proposed by Schrader forces the viewer’s meta reflection about transgression hidden in any gaze (here it is the transgression of the beauty doomed for disruption). The narrative voice, which belongs to Robert, links this text with a confessional theme of suicidal glory, characteristic of Schrader’s oeuvre (his Misima in particular). This makes another layer of self-reflection. Personal fiasco and self-loss are represented this time in Schrader’s own ‘Venetian text’, which is accompanied by the grief about lost values and inability to gain the perfect beauty.