The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
NEW FEST: 20th Anniversary NY LGB&T Film Festival: "Were the World Mine" (2008)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
"Need some gay pride? Check this out: star-crossed lovers faced with the insurmountable odds of being out in the 1950s, with a 30-year age difference, and living in the scrutinizing public spotlight, give convention the middle finger to bask in the purity of a love lasting three decades.
And it’s a true story."
Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood in the early ’50s.
Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood sitting in front of a portrait of themselves painted by David Hockney (late ’70s).
For large format images of the thumbnails above, go to:
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=chrisanddon&mode=downloads
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Chris & Don: a love story
New York Starts June 13
Huntington Starts June 13
Fort Lauderdale Starts June 27
Los Angeles July 4-July 11
Berkeley July 18-July 25
San Francisco July 18-July 25
Boston July 18-July 24
Philadelphia July 23-August 1
Chicago Starts July 25
Minneapolis July 25-August 1
San Diego July 25-August 1
Washington, DC July 25-July 31
Atlanta August 1-August 7
Kansas City Starts August 1
Seattle August 1-August 7
St. Louis August 1-August 8
Columbus, OH September 18
Shakesthecoffecan:
--- Quote from: southendmd on June 04, 2008, 09:56:19 am ---
It's also playing at the Provincetown film festival in two weeks and I'm going!
--- End quote ---
And so will I, we'll have to see if this one is still available.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/47836/
From New York Magazine:
Christopher Isherwood’s true love
By David Edelstein
Published Jun 13, 2008
Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s documentary Chris & Don tells the story of a gay English blue blood who in the fifties picked up a working-class stud muffin 30 years his junior on a Santa Monica beach and became obsessed with him. Primed as we are by a culture rich in both homophobia and dirty old men, we can be forgiven for anticipating a sordid cautionary tale. It’s a shock—a happy shock—when Chris & Don recounts a love that approaches the transcendental.
Chris is Christopher Isherwood, famous for Berlin Stories—which was the basis of Cabaret and inspires in Chris & Don an unfortunate tangent about how wrong Isherwood thought Liza Minnelli was for Sally Bowles. Don is Don Bachardy, an unsophisticated Californian given to movie-star worship—and most impressed, at first, by Isherwood’s acquaintance with Montgomery Clift. Eyebrows are raised when they move in together.
But a fascinating thread emerges in interviews with friends and in excerpts from Isherwood’s diary—read via the magic of movies by Michael York, who played the author’s alter ego in Cabaret. Chris’s ideal love would have to be someone outside his class, who wouldn’t remind him of everything he fled (going as far, you’ll recall, as Weimar). And in Don he recognized a fellow artist—albeit one with vastly different gifts. The young man evolved into a marvelous portrait painter, with an eye for the detail that turns a likeness into an X-ray.
Isherwood passed away in 1986, but Bachardy still lives in the house they shared and still paints attractive young men in stages of undress. He speaks in an English accent that is distinctly Isherwood’s. The creepiness dissipates the more you get to know him. After Bachardy became successful in his own right, he and Isherwood had periods of estrangement, took lovers, and pushed the limits of domesticity. But he was there at Isherwood’s deathbed, drawing him compulsively, then drawing his body for hours after his passing.
The sequence, like the movie, is stunningly open and heartfelt. We look at those final drawings of Isherwood and sense what Bachardy is doing: capturing surface details in a feverish attempt to go beyond them—to get to the core of his lover’s being. Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0824,opposites-attract,464862,20.html
From The Village Voice:
Opposites Attract in Chris & Don
Portrait of the artist as a young man (and his lover as an old one)
by ERNEST HARDY
June 10th, 2008 12:00 AM
Chris and Don
With a glint in his eye and a grin on his lips, artist Don Bachardy looks into the camera and explains the dynamic of his three-decade relationship with the late literary icon Christopher Isherwood as if it were a fairy tale.
"His role," says Bachardy, "could be described as that of the arch villain. He took this young boy and he warped him to his mold. He taught him all kinds of wicked things." Pause a half beat. "It was exactly what the boy wanted. And we flourished."
With his elegant cadence, crisp comedic timing, and witty flipping of homophobic stereotypes—in his very choice and use of language—Bachardy is that story come to life: the student who eventually mirrored his teacher, the molded who became a duplicate of the mold.
Chris & Don: A Love Story is a charming, illuminating portrait of the complex and storied queer romance between Isherwood and Bachardy, who met on a Santa Monica beach in 1952, when Bachardy was a teenager and Isherwood already 30 years his senior.
Quilted from black-and-white home-movie clips, animated sequences that bring to life the duo's correspondence and pet names, and original footage of the elderly Bachardy going about his daily routine or walking through the art-filled Santa Monica home he once shared with his partner, Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's film uses standard documentary-filmmaking tools to celebrate three entities—Isherwood, Bachardy, and their relationship—that flaunted all the rules.
Individually, the men are fascinating in their own right, and Mascara and Santi flesh out their backstories in rich detail: Isherwood's aristocratic upbringing and his break from it—though his background forever influenced every aspect of his being—and his life in Berlin, which became the basis for some of his most celebrated work (The Berlin Stories); Bachardy's conservative, homophobic family life, and the electric-shock treatments that permanently debilitated his queer older brother.
But it's the relationship and life that the men forged together that are most extraordinary. Their cosmopolitan circle (glamorous and influential friends included Elsa Lanchester, W.H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell) was at the center of a bygone era of both hyper-literate high culture and outsider chic.
The terms on which the couple set up house not only reach back to the most ancient manifestations of queer coupling (the older man taking a younger partner under his wing, schooling him on life, culture, and sex), but also illustrate lingering issues with—or even within—the modern gay and lesbian community.
Theirs was an organic, constantly evolving companionship. They quite consciously shaped it, but also allowed it to find its own patterns and path. There was extraordinary vulnerability in their union ("Don might leave me," Isherwood is quoted as saying, "but I could never leave him. Not unless he ceased to need me"), only matched by extraordinary faith in their bond.
The relationship contained elements of the parent/child hierarchy (with the roles flip-flopping back and forth over time), but it was also an erotic quest that expanded to include other lovers—especially as Bachardy matured into his own man—and then retreated back to monogamous form again, at least emotionally. And as Bachardy grew into his own creativity, theirs became a conversation between artists, too. With the most delicate of hands, directors Mascara and Santi shape their investigative film into the revelation that all of this constituted Chris and Don's love story.
The recent California Supreme Court ruling overturning the ban on gay marriage brings gays, lesbians, and same-sex relationships one crucial step closer to legitimacy in the eyes of the law—a legitimacy that was unimaginable when our two heroes first met in the '50s. But as confetti and champagne toasts greet the news, it might be a good thing for gays and straights to glean some lessons from Isherwood and Bachardy's example: Make your own rules, set your own terms for connection, and be willing to let them evolve as you and your partner hopefully do.
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