Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 357: Wed Dec 23

Far from Heaven (Haynes, 2002): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.20pm



This film screens in 35mm in the BFI Love: The Power of Love season strand. You can find the full details of the season here and you can find the details for this film's screenings on the 5th and 9th December here.

Chicago Reader review:
Todd Haynes's best feature to date—a provocative companion piece to his underrated Safe (1995), which also starred Julianne Moore as a lost suburban housewife but is otherwise quite different. This captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary. The story, set in 1957, concerns a traditional if well-to-do "homemaker" who falls in love with her black gardener (a superb performance by Dennis Haysbert) around the time that she discovers her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual. Frankly, I find this movie more emotionally powerful, more truthful about the 50s, and more meaningful than any of the Technicolor Douglas Sirk pictures it evokes, even though it trades in obvious artifice in a way the originals never did. Though technically an independent feature, this is in fact one of the best Hollywood movies around.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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