All Stressed Up, No Place to Go

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Feeling a little pressed these days? Bills piling up, recession getting you down? Then you may find it perversely consoling to reflect on the desperate straits of Jake and Tina (John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell) in The Object of Beauty.

American Express has just turned his Gold Card into dross, their posh London hotel is pressing them to settle a steadily mounting bill, and the future of his cocoa futures is dim indeed; the beans are rotting on the docks somewhere in South America, the result of a highly inconvenient strike.

Their only resource is a small Henry Moore sculpture, the title's "object of beauty," and it is their prime subject of debate as they whine and dine. She owns it. He needs it. She thinks it would be nice to fake a theft and enter an insurance claim. He is in favor of a forthright sale. While Jake and Tina talk, their hotel maid acts: she makes off with the Moore.

Desperately poor and also disabled (she is deaf and cannot speak), Jenny (Rudi Davies) is the only character in the film who is actually worthy of this exquisitely enigmatic art. For as she finally puts it in a note, it speaks to her, and despite her limitations, she can hear what it is saying. To complete the film's moral balance, she has a brother who is the only figure totally insensate to the value, financial or spiritual, of the sculpture. To him it's just something to try to fence for a few pounds sterling and toss on a junk heap when he fails.

The film, written and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, may seem schematic in the retelling. But on the screen it is charged with curious ironies and the edgy energy of barely suppressed panic. Its temporarily grounded jet-setters may seem rather remote figures. But in the playing they aren't as sophisticated as they would like to seem; and as they paint themselves deeper and deeper into a corner, one cannot help relating to them. Debt -- especially debt run up in pursuit of pleasures beyond one's means -- is, after all, one of the central subjects of middle-class life, and also one that movies determinedly avoid. Even if this movie were less nuanced in its pursuit of the forbidden topic, it would be welcome. But dry, clear and finely tuned, The Object of Beauty is a treasurable chamber piece.

The Comfort of Strangers also features an unmarried couple, Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson), resident at a hostelry outside their native land and facing up to yet another common middle-class problem. Their setting is Venice; their issue is the joylessness of sex. But the mood, well established by Paul Schrader's direction and Harold Pinter's elliptical screenplay, is one of languid menace. It is personified by Christopher Walken, excellent as Robert, whose psychopathic weirdness simultaneously attracts and repels the couple. And mysteriously energizes them. In his sexuality there is political metaphor. He is an undeclared fascist, hiding the threat of self- destruction under the lure of self-actualization. The movie is full of unsolved mysteries. Why does Robert choose to stalk this pair? What motivates his sadism, which is of both the delicately patient and suddenly violent varieties? Nice questions, which are left to resonate in our minds.

Sometimes its air of doomy portent is stifling. But equally often it turns into a kind of Creepshow for grownups, teasing the mind with its enigmas, bedazzling the eye with its imagery. Finally, like its villain, it draws one into a very oddly woven web.