Chris & Don: A Love Story
Directed by Guido Santi & Tina Mascara
at the Quad Cinema
Derek
Directed by Isaac Julien
at MoMA
through June 16
“There are no more lovers left alive,” Neil Tennant sang in Pet Shop Boys’ “Dreaming of the Queen” (1993), a lament for AIDS devastation that distinguished itself from ordinary threnodies by recognizing a certain alienation and inhospitality that settled upon the world—especially gay culture—ever since. That song resonates through two new documentaries, Derek by Isaac Julien and Chris & Don: A Love Story by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara. Both are elegies to gay cultural figures, British filmmaker Derek Jarman and British novelist Christopher Isherwood, but they also uniquely chronicle lives of affection and rebellion—personalities that are rarely found in the gay films that break into today’s mainstream. These gay documentaries show more loving than today’s gay film fiction.
The most remarkable of the two docs, Chris & Don: A Love Story, is built around painter Don Bachardy’s reminiscence about his relationship with the late Isherwood who was 30 years his senior. (They were together 34 years until Isherwood’s death in 1986.) Now at 74, Bachardy has grown into a sage position that adds poignance and legitimacy to his reflections on what was once seen as an unorthodox, man-boy liason. Still impish, Bachardy’s third-person recall tells how Isherwood “took this young boy, taught him all kinds of wicked things. It was exactly what the boy wanted, and he flourished.” Directors Santi and Mascara deliberately begin with such provocation in order to explore a complicated aspect of homosexuality that goes deeper than politics. (This risquÈ profundity transcends the current gay-marriage debate.)
The first images of Chris and Don together in Malibu, Santa Monica and Hollywood from the 1950s to the ’80s virtually advertise the prevailing gay male stereotype: white privilege affluent in culture, good-looks and youthfulness. But by examining this older/younger couple for differences of social circumstance, individual ego and personal desire that pertain to any love relationship, Santi and Mascara present a complex testament of gay experience. It’s remarkable because it’s rare.
In Derek, Isaac Julien evokes the graphically complex style of Derek Jarman’s radical filmmaking to commemorate the tensions and tangled ambitions of a modern, politically aware gay artist. Collaborating with Tilda Swinton, Jarman’s frequent star and co-conspirator, Julien honors Jarman’s legacy by inter-cutting footage from Jarman’s films with interviews and Swinton’s memories. He emphasizes and replicates Jarmanesque images of anxiety, conflict and struggle. Swinton’s own soundtrack narration specifies the devotion inside this abstract structure—”I’m missing my pal. Looking for the fun of you, the company”—and that makes it special. The fidelity of Julien’s technique creates nostalgia for a filmmaking peer who prioritizes the love and political struggle that Jarman (who died in 1994) put on film.
Julien’s restless collage style also includes footage from a 1990 interview by Bernard Rose where Jarman pondered the essential gay artist’s question, “How does one get to love oneself if everything that’s said about you is negative.” This immediately addresses the confusion shown by today’s filmmakers (from Gus Van Sant to Tom Kalin) who defend gayness in negative terms. Jarman tells how he emerged from “a world where sexuality was absolutely strangulated.” His film sense grew alongside England’s punk music movement: “The punk revolt got under my skin and opened up all kinds of wounds. That was the time when actual venom poured out about social situations we all discovered ourselves in [that were] made aggravating by being gay and having one’s life bottled up.” It was this connection of sex and politics, life and art, that led Jarman to reject the commercial film industry and become England’s first successful independent filmmaker (like a British Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger in the United States but politically focused). Influenced by painting (“You couldn’t do [what David Hockney did] because you were going to be a follower”), Jarman worked in 8mm, insisting that his first film Sebastian “started as a joke. I was making a gay lib film. To understand that you have to go back to the ’70s.”
As the chronology of these two films progresses, a common portrait of a past gay liberation struggle is documented. Isherwood, in a personal form of revolt, escaped his privileged British background for the Continent. (“He couldn’t relax sexually with someone of his own class or nation” John Boorman recalls.) It becomes clear that the pioneering aspects of Isherwood’s writing (his 1939 collection Berlin Stories became the source for the musical Cabaret) derived from a search for free expression and personal fulfillment—a life of experimentation and creativity that led him to Southern California where he met the preternaturally boyish 22-year-old Don. “If you could still be like that at 40, one would be a saint,” Isherwood marvels, a Death in Venice gush that evokes the familiar gay male quest for idealized (misunderstood) innocence. Through the film’s trenchant structure, Santi and Mascara elucidate Isherwood’s infatuation and counter it with Bachardy’s own perspective.
Isherwood’s diary is spoken by Michael York (star of Cabaret) in his unmistakable soft tones—lending a tender, loving voice to Isherwood’s confessions about his feelings for Don: “A sense of responsibility that was almost fatherly made me anxious and filled with joy.” York insinuates—and universalizes—homosexual affection without the pathology seen in Mysterious Skin. This honors how Isherwood sanctioned love as part of his personal gay liberation. A witness attests that Isherwood “wanted a long-time personal commitment to a serious relationship with a partner.” Santi and Mascara use animated sequences, based on drawings Isherwood and Bachardy made in the margins of letters, that whimsically portray Chris as a pony and Don as a cat. Better than the occasional live re-enactments (hate that stuff), these self-conscious cartoons are Albee-worthy symbolism that communicates the complications of adult bonding—such as the men fighting or seeking other one-night partners (Don calls it “mousing”).
When Chris’ present-day, “widower” life dominates the film, his recollection of affinity and resistance—the particular ways lovers negotiate partnership—gives the film a new intimate depth. Chris’ feelings contrast Don’s in a way that again evokes PSB, this time the “Young Offender” lyric: “When I get in your way, or open your eyes/ Who will give whom the bigger surprise?” Here’s where Chris & Don is outstanding. Not even the finest overtly gay fiction films (Querelle, Savage Nights, Wild Reeds, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and Broken Sky) offered more insight.
Jarman’s films (Sebastian, Caravaggio, Jubilee) stood out for their rhetorical flourishes. He describes his method as “bringing certain things I found valuable in the past into the present. I think it’s what Pasolini was about. All artists—Shakespeare certainly—everyone’s doing the same thing.” Jarman wasn’t solipsistic; he used history, adaptations of pre-existing texts, to reflect gay men’s contemporary political conflicts. It was also an effort to maintain certain humane virtues despite modern gay amorality. Derek’s two most candid moments are Jarman’s confessions that “I had lovers but they all seemed to be platonic in the end” and that the violent aggression seen in some of his films was “Perform[ance], art as a sort of revenge” against repression.
Seeing Derek next to Chris & Don gives a sense of cultural movement. Iconic figures like Hockney and Tennessee Williams appear in both movies, providing continuity that has less to do with fame than with a shared concept of gay life and gay art as an emotional sojourn. The halcyon days of Isherwood introducing Bachardy to Williams, Clift, Capote, Lancaster, Auden, Huxley, Magnani, Stravinsky and Caron are contrasted with a Paul Bowles hashish adventure that frightens and deepens the couples’ interdependence—they fulfill each others’ most desperate emotional needs. Boorman avers that Isherwood “succeeded in cloning himself in some way” and the filmmakers use this observation to explain Bachardy’s own artistic evolvement. The California native who grew up admiring movies and movie stars—he even swanned around with his older, twin-like but emotionally unstable brother Ted (a disturbing subplot, tactfully handled)—was encouraged by Isherwood to pursue his drawing talent. Bachardy’s portraits of the aged celebrities he met—drawn by a younger fan—provides a powerful resonance. Even as white-haired Bachardy presently draws young nude male models, he continues the transference of artistic compassion that is the legacy of his love affair.
Chris & Don’s example is crucially necessary today to counteract the predatory exploitation in recent gay movies. This doc acknowledges the triumph of Isherwood’s art, even when he felt its limits. He mused, “Why invent when life is so prodigious? That sinking, sick feeling of love for Don somehow connected with the torn shorts.” Santi and Mascara link this to an incandescent home-movie image of Don in torn shorts running up beach stairs. And the sequence of Bachardy drawing Chris during his final infirm days has an astounding openness, intimacy and candor. By comparison, “outlaw” movies like Mala Noche, Let’s Get Lost and Mysterious Skin debase us all.
I once interviewed Derek Jarman when he and Tilda Swinton, a chummy, cordial team, came to New York to promote Caravaggio. Jarman spoke enthusiastically about having just filmed a three-part music video for The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead album. Julien includes a brief Smiths clip—and it’s a bright, burning moment—yet a Derek talking head says it was “mind-destroying in terms of compromises he had to make.” Later, Jarman tells Bernard Rose that his Pet Shop Boys video “It’s a Sin” is “one of the best things I’ve ever done.” But in fact, Jarman made an additional Smiths video, which surely inspired his stylistically similar masterwork The Last of England. I know Isaac Julien wouldn’t get his facts wrong, but the one flaw of Derek is that it denies the magnanimous, pop aspect of Jarman’s work. If Jarman preferred “It’s a Sin,” to The Queen Is Dead, it must have been because PSB expressed his subconscious gay panic, while The Smiths’ songs pre-empted his own attempt at pop-art revolution.
Meanwhile, Swinton’s heartfelt narration leans heavily on art-school cant: “The dead hand of good taste has commenced its last great attempt to buy up every soul on the planet. The Sunday Times educated us that culture means digested opinion about marketable artistic endeavors. Art is now indivisible from the idea of culture: Culture from heritage. Heritage from tourism. Tourism is the art of illusion.” She’s not wrong, but her attitude confines Jarman’s art to the academy and reduces it to being doctrinaire.
Perhaps Swinton seeks expiation for her disappointing Oscar acceptance speech that neglected Jarman while smarmily praising George Clooney. Here, declaring Jarman “indeed the great Thatcherite filmmaker” doesn’t suffice. Yet, when Swinton eulogizes Jarman’s dictum “Less fiscal reporting, more film. Less rules more examples. Less dependency, more love,” she complements the very affecting Chris & Don. It confirms she felt Jarman deeply. These two eulogy films make one wonder, was Pet Shop Boys’ moral implication correct?
Directed by Guido Santi & Tina Mascara
at the Quad Cinema
Derek
Directed by Isaac Julien
at MoMA
through June 16
“There are no more lovers left alive,” Neil Tennant sang in Pet Shop Boys’ “Dreaming of the Queen” (1993), a lament for AIDS devastation that distinguished itself from ordinary threnodies by recognizing a certain alienation and inhospitality that settled upon the world—especially gay culture—ever since. That song resonates through two new documentaries, Derek by Isaac Julien and Chris & Don: A Love Story by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara. Both are elegies to gay cultural figures, British filmmaker Derek Jarman and British novelist Christopher Isherwood, but they also uniquely chronicle lives of affection and rebellion—personalities that are rarely found in the gay films that break into today’s mainstream. These gay documentaries show more loving than today’s gay film fiction.
The most remarkable of the two docs, Chris & Don: A Love Story, is built around painter Don Bachardy’s reminiscence about his relationship with the late Isherwood who was 30 years his senior. (They were together 34 years until Isherwood’s death in 1986.) Now at 74, Bachardy has grown into a sage position that adds poignance and legitimacy to his reflections on what was once seen as an unorthodox, man-boy liason. Still impish, Bachardy’s third-person recall tells how Isherwood “took this young boy, taught him all kinds of wicked things. It was exactly what the boy wanted, and he flourished.” Directors Santi and Mascara deliberately begin with such provocation in order to explore a complicated aspect of homosexuality that goes deeper than politics. (This risquÈ profundity transcends the current gay-marriage debate.)
The first images of Chris and Don together in Malibu, Santa Monica and Hollywood from the 1950s to the ’80s virtually advertise the prevailing gay male stereotype: white privilege affluent in culture, good-looks and youthfulness. But by examining this older/younger couple for differences of social circumstance, individual ego and personal desire that pertain to any love relationship, Santi and Mascara present a complex testament of gay experience. It’s remarkable because it’s rare.
In Derek, Isaac Julien evokes the graphically complex style of Derek Jarman’s radical filmmaking to commemorate the tensions and tangled ambitions of a modern, politically aware gay artist. Collaborating with Tilda Swinton, Jarman’s frequent star and co-conspirator, Julien honors Jarman’s legacy by inter-cutting footage from Jarman’s films with interviews and Swinton’s memories. He emphasizes and replicates Jarmanesque images of anxiety, conflict and struggle. Swinton’s own soundtrack narration specifies the devotion inside this abstract structure—”I’m missing my pal. Looking for the fun of you, the company”—and that makes it special. The fidelity of Julien’s technique creates nostalgia for a filmmaking peer who prioritizes the love and political struggle that Jarman (who died in 1994) put on film.
Julien’s restless collage style also includes footage from a 1990 interview by Bernard Rose where Jarman pondered the essential gay artist’s question, “How does one get to love oneself if everything that’s said about you is negative.” This immediately addresses the confusion shown by today’s filmmakers (from Gus Van Sant to Tom Kalin) who defend gayness in negative terms. Jarman tells how he emerged from “a world where sexuality was absolutely strangulated.” His film sense grew alongside England’s punk music movement: “The punk revolt got under my skin and opened up all kinds of wounds. That was the time when actual venom poured out about social situations we all discovered ourselves in [that were] made aggravating by being gay and having one’s life bottled up.” It was this connection of sex and politics, life and art, that led Jarman to reject the commercial film industry and become England’s first successful independent filmmaker (like a British Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger in the United States but politically focused). Influenced by painting (“You couldn’t do [what David Hockney did] because you were going to be a follower”), Jarman worked in 8mm, insisting that his first film Sebastian “started as a joke. I was making a gay lib film. To understand that you have to go back to the ’70s.”
As the chronology of these two films progresses, a common portrait of a past gay liberation struggle is documented. Isherwood, in a personal form of revolt, escaped his privileged British background for the Continent. (“He couldn’t relax sexually with someone of his own class or nation” John Boorman recalls.) It becomes clear that the pioneering aspects of Isherwood’s writing (his 1939 collection Berlin Stories became the source for the musical Cabaret) derived from a search for free expression and personal fulfillment—a life of experimentation and creativity that led him to Southern California where he met the preternaturally boyish 22-year-old Don. “If you could still be like that at 40, one would be a saint,” Isherwood marvels, a Death in Venice gush that evokes the familiar gay male quest for idealized (misunderstood) innocence. Through the film’s trenchant structure, Santi and Mascara elucidate Isherwood’s infatuation and counter it with Bachardy’s own perspective.
Isherwood’s diary is spoken by Michael York (star of Cabaret) in his unmistakable soft tones—lending a tender, loving voice to Isherwood’s confessions about his feelings for Don: “A sense of responsibility that was almost fatherly made me anxious and filled with joy.” York insinuates—and universalizes—homosexual affection without the pathology seen in Mysterious Skin. This honors how Isherwood sanctioned love as part of his personal gay liberation. A witness attests that Isherwood “wanted a long-time personal commitment to a serious relationship with a partner.” Santi and Mascara use animated sequences, based on drawings Isherwood and Bachardy made in the margins of letters, that whimsically portray Chris as a pony and Don as a cat. Better than the occasional live re-enactments (hate that stuff), these self-conscious cartoons are Albee-worthy symbolism that communicates the complications of adult bonding—such as the men fighting or seeking other one-night partners (Don calls it “mousing”).
When Chris’ present-day, “widower” life dominates the film, his recollection of affinity and resistance—the particular ways lovers negotiate partnership—gives the film a new intimate depth. Chris’ feelings contrast Don’s in a way that again evokes PSB, this time the “Young Offender” lyric: “When I get in your way, or open your eyes/ Who will give whom the bigger surprise?” Here’s where Chris & Don is outstanding. Not even the finest overtly gay fiction films (Querelle, Savage Nights, Wild Reeds, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and Broken Sky) offered more insight.
Jarman’s films (Sebastian, Caravaggio, Jubilee) stood out for their rhetorical flourishes. He describes his method as “bringing certain things I found valuable in the past into the present. I think it’s what Pasolini was about. All artists—Shakespeare certainly—everyone’s doing the same thing.” Jarman wasn’t solipsistic; he used history, adaptations of pre-existing texts, to reflect gay men’s contemporary political conflicts. It was also an effort to maintain certain humane virtues despite modern gay amorality. Derek’s two most candid moments are Jarman’s confessions that “I had lovers but they all seemed to be platonic in the end” and that the violent aggression seen in some of his films was “Perform[ance], art as a sort of revenge” against repression.
Seeing Derek next to Chris & Don gives a sense of cultural movement. Iconic figures like Hockney and Tennessee Williams appear in both movies, providing continuity that has less to do with fame than with a shared concept of gay life and gay art as an emotional sojourn. The halcyon days of Isherwood introducing Bachardy to Williams, Clift, Capote, Lancaster, Auden, Huxley, Magnani, Stravinsky and Caron are contrasted with a Paul Bowles hashish adventure that frightens and deepens the couples’ interdependence—they fulfill each others’ most desperate emotional needs. Boorman avers that Isherwood “succeeded in cloning himself in some way” and the filmmakers use this observation to explain Bachardy’s own artistic evolvement. The California native who grew up admiring movies and movie stars—he even swanned around with his older, twin-like but emotionally unstable brother Ted (a disturbing subplot, tactfully handled)—was encouraged by Isherwood to pursue his drawing talent. Bachardy’s portraits of the aged celebrities he met—drawn by a younger fan—provides a powerful resonance. Even as white-haired Bachardy presently draws young nude male models, he continues the transference of artistic compassion that is the legacy of his love affair.
Chris & Don’s example is crucially necessary today to counteract the predatory exploitation in recent gay movies. This doc acknowledges the triumph of Isherwood’s art, even when he felt its limits. He mused, “Why invent when life is so prodigious? That sinking, sick feeling of love for Don somehow connected with the torn shorts.” Santi and Mascara link this to an incandescent home-movie image of Don in torn shorts running up beach stairs. And the sequence of Bachardy drawing Chris during his final infirm days has an astounding openness, intimacy and candor. By comparison, “outlaw” movies like Mala Noche, Let’s Get Lost and Mysterious Skin debase us all.
I once interviewed Derek Jarman when he and Tilda Swinton, a chummy, cordial team, came to New York to promote Caravaggio. Jarman spoke enthusiastically about having just filmed a three-part music video for The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead album. Julien includes a brief Smiths clip—and it’s a bright, burning moment—yet a Derek talking head says it was “mind-destroying in terms of compromises he had to make.” Later, Jarman tells Bernard Rose that his Pet Shop Boys video “It’s a Sin” is “one of the best things I’ve ever done.” But in fact, Jarman made an additional Smiths video, which surely inspired his stylistically similar masterwork The Last of England. I know Isaac Julien wouldn’t get his facts wrong, but the one flaw of Derek is that it denies the magnanimous, pop aspect of Jarman’s work. If Jarman preferred “It’s a Sin,” to The Queen Is Dead, it must have been because PSB expressed his subconscious gay panic, while The Smiths’ songs pre-empted his own attempt at pop-art revolution.
Meanwhile, Swinton’s heartfelt narration leans heavily on art-school cant: “The dead hand of good taste has commenced its last great attempt to buy up every soul on the planet. The Sunday Times educated us that culture means digested opinion about marketable artistic endeavors. Art is now indivisible from the idea of culture: Culture from heritage. Heritage from tourism. Tourism is the art of illusion.” She’s not wrong, but her attitude confines Jarman’s art to the academy and reduces it to being doctrinaire.
Perhaps Swinton seeks expiation for her disappointing Oscar acceptance speech that neglected Jarman while smarmily praising George Clooney. Here, declaring Jarman “indeed the great Thatcherite filmmaker” doesn’t suffice. Yet, when Swinton eulogizes Jarman’s dictum “Less fiscal reporting, more film. Less rules more examples. Less dependency, more love,” she complements the very affecting Chris & Don. It confirms she felt Jarman deeply. These two eulogy films make one wonder, was Pet Shop Boys’ moral implication correct?
