Orientalising Venice: Inverting the Othering Gaze in the Film Adaptation of The Comfort of Strangers

European auteur cinema has frequently relied on adapting qualitatively superior literary texts into screenplays. Moreover, with the advent of digital film, the modes of reception of literature and film converge and are increasingly characterized by the principles of hermeneutics and its circular, and cyclical, process of analysis. The present study explores both the similarities in the artistic processes of creating fiction on the page and on the screen, as well as the transformations necessary in the process of adapting literature to film. Basing the analysis on critical concepts such as Edward Said's Orientalism, Paul Schrader's postulate of potential empathy and Brian Jarvis's observations on the literary leitmotif of walking and watching, the analysis strives to show how novelist and filmmaker choose divergent strategies to achieve similar effects. McEwan's strategy rests on a disorienting narrative set in an incomprehensible foreign city conveyed to the reader through the conscience of the emotionally alienated characters. The cultural connotations toy with, yet ultimately defy, a clear identification with the actual city of Venice. Conversely, the filmmakers – clearly unwilling to sacrifice the dramatic potential and the recognisability of Venice – choose to deploy a strategy that relies on cultural connotation as well. However, in contrast to McEwan's geographical and cultural opacity, Schrader achieves a similar effect by generating an audiovisual concept (employing both music and mise-en-scène) that places Robert and Mary's Venetian house at the centre of an alien, labyrinthine twilight-zone, a kind of orientalised, ritualized domain which inexorably becomes the venue of a pagan ritual of human sacrifice.