Far from Heaven


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"

Born and raised in Germany, the son of Danish parents, Douglas Sirk was a consummate director of melodramas, and there was much that was melodramatic in his own life. He quit Germany in the late Thirties with his Jewish wife, leaving behind a son of his first marriage. This strikingly handsome boy, a child movie star, became a Nazi under the influence of his mother and was killed fighting with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front while Sirk was making anti-Nazi movies in Hollywood. This is like the plot of one of the movies Sirk directed at Universal Studios in the Fifties before retiring from filmmaking in 1959 and returning to Germany.
These Universal films, starring Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack, Jane Wyman and Lana Turner, used the conventions of the women's picture to probe the anxieties simmering beneath the surface of a decade notable for its conformity. Though they were immensely popular, it took some years for Sirk to win critical acclaim for his acute social observation and his expressive use of colour, decor and music.
His influence has been especially acknowledged by two European directors, both gay - Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pedro Almodóvar. Now one of the leading members of America's self-styled 'New Queer Cinema', Todd Haynes, has made the Sirk pastiche, Far From Heaven, his most mainstream work to date. With Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney as executive producers, it is in every respect a magnificently achieved movie.
Like Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul, Far From Heaven is principally inspired by All That Heaven Allows, the 1955 Sirk film in which the well-off, recently widowed Jane Wyman, forms a close friendship with her gardener, Rock Hudson, and becomes an embarrassment to her children and the subject of malevolent gossip in her New England town. Haynes has set his picture in the autumn and winter of 1957 in Hartford, Connecticut, where Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) is a highly regarded figure in the community. She seems to have the perfect marriage - a handsome, successful husband, two obedient children, a uniformed black maid, a house that exudes what was then called 'gracious living'.
In the background - seen on TV and discussed at cocktail parties - is the enforced integration of high schools and the rioting outside Central High in Little Rock that forced President Eisenhower to intervene. In the foreground, her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), is drinking heavily and the kindly Cathy strikes up a friendship with a handsome young gardener, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), who has a degree in business and a little daughter.
He happens to be black and tongues begin to wag viciously. It also transpires that Frank is a guilt-ridden closet homosexual and Cathy arranges for him to discuss his 'sickness' with a doctor whose suggestions range from counselling to aversion therapy. What the movie makes abundantly clear is that neither of the problems confronting Cathy can be solved by a little goodwill and understanding. They demand major changes in society and in attitudes towards race and sexuality.
Haynes is, of course, treating directly racial matters that were handled gingerly by films in the Fifties, and sexual ones that were approached with immense obliquity by Hollywood. (The American stage was freer, though in Britain serious plays dealing with homosexuality were banned by the Lord Chamberlain.) It was not until Advise and Consent in 1962 that Hollywood showed us a gay bar, and the troubled married gay visiting it had to commit suicide.
But Haynes doesn't preach and he doesn't mock the past. He takes Sirk's style of heightened colour, romantic music and slightly larger-than-life acting to recreate the Fifties with affection and understanding. The movie begins with a crane shot, sweeping down from the autumnal trees to close in on Cathy and her happy family as Elmer Bernstein's lush score with its soaring strings and plangent piano plays on the soundtrack. The fin-tailed cars look as if they've emerged from advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post .
The costumes (by the great British designer, Sandy Powell) are exactly right. Everyone wears hats over their immaculately coiffed hair. The women's dresses have cinched waists, are made of slightly heavy materials with flaring skirts and, for formal occasions, stiff petticoats beneath. Cathy never goes out without wearing gloves, and there's a different pair in an appropriate colour for every occasion.
The astonishing thing is that for all the obvious calculation and the invitation to admire its virtuosity, Haynes's exercise in postmodernism is as moving and as heartbreaking as the classic women's pictures to which he pays homage. Dennis Quaid catches just the right slightly cowed tone of the Fifties organisation man, who had grown up in the Depression, survived the war and is slightly dazed by the affluent society and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Julianne Moore looks uncannily like her fellow redhead, Pat Nixon, the exemplary perfect wife of the Fifties who has sacrificed her identity to her role as homemaker and supporter of her husband. It is a perfect, subtly nuanced performance. I lived in America at the precise time this picture is set and can testify to its uncanny accuracy.

abundantly - obficie
to acclaim - oklaskiwać, nagradzać brawami
acute - ostry, przenikliwy
affluent - zamożny, dostatni, bogaty
annihilation - zagłada
to cinch - zacisnąć popręg, więc dress with cinched dress - suknia ściągnięta (wcięta) w talii
closet - skryty
coiffed - (z francuskiego) uczesany
consummate - wytrawny, wielkiej miary
cowed - przestraszony, zastraszony
crane - dźwig, zatem crane shot - ujęcie z dźwigu (podnośnika)
dazed - oszołomiony, oślepiony, czasownik: to daze - oślepiać, oszałamiać
to exude - to produce from incide yourself- wydzielać
flaring - rozszerzany, flaring skirt - rozszerzana spódnica
gingerly - ostrożnie, delikatnie
homage - hołd, to pay homage - składać hołd
immaculately - niepokalanie
lush - soczysty, bujny
malevolent - niechętny, wrogi
to mock - wyśmiewać, wyszydzać
obedient - posłuszny
obliquity - nieszczerość, hipokryzja, dwulicowość
petticoat - halka
plangent - jękliwy; grzmiący, hałaśliwy
probe - zbadać, zgłębić
to riot - wszczynać zamieszki, protestować na ulicy
score - muzyka filmowa; partytura
to simmer - gotować się, wrzeć
soar - unosić się w powietrzu
string - struna
uncannily - niesamowicie
vicious - złośliwy, zjadliwy
the tongue wags - strzępi język
widowed - owdowiały


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