by MATTHEW HAYS

In the late ’80s the promise of what had come to be known as the New Queer Cinema seemed boundless. Gus Van Sant, Tom Kalin, Gregg Araki, Patricia Rozema and Todd Haynes were rewriting the rule book on gay and lesbian representations, and it seemed virtually everything on the indie film scene was being pleasingly bent out of shape.

Cut to two years ago, and critics were asking where the beef was. Van Sant had driven off course, focusing on the straightforward and maudlin with films like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. Rozema had devolved to a simplistic coming-out story, When Night Is Falling. Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine had failed to turn up gold and the question still stands: where’s Gregg Araki? The promise of New Queer Cinema, a few noted, hadn’t been borne out.

All that changed this past film festival season, when Haynes’ latest feature, Far From Heaven, wowed critics unanimously. (I’ve yet to read one even remotely negative review—quite an achievement in itself.) The film has Julianne Moore starring as a picture-perfect housewife in ’57 middle America. As Look magazine once suggested of Rock Hudson, she and her family smell of milk. Her ad-executive husband, Dennis Quaid, appears to be the rock of Gibraltar. They have a stunning house, two adorable children and a legion of supportive friends.

Soaking in Sirk’s soap

But things don’t stay calm for long in Haynes’ deeply referential universe. This is a film inspired by the work of weepie director Douglas Sirk, the auteur who commanded the screen throughout the ’50s with such A-list soapers as Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. This film is an unusual amalgam of the themes touched upon in the latter two of these films. Moore soon learns that her husband isn’t staying late at work because of deadlines, but rather a covert affair with another man. In desperate distress, she finds solace in the warm emotional embrace of her gardener, who happens to be black.

If Sirk had the ability to create something very artificial-looking while also making it heartfelt, Haynes has perfectly understood this double-edged sword in Sirk’s oeuvre. Far From Heaven is an astonishing, intricate high-wire act; Haynes makes the perfect pitch between irony and sentimentality, artifice and realism, nostalgia and contemporary angst, thoughtful meditation and five-hankie weepie. Haynes has turned Sirk’s picture of quintessential America—passionately colourful while repressively conformist—inside out, bringing the issue of homosexuality to the fore while revisiting Sirk’s take on the racial divide.

Meeting up with Haynes at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, he looked understandably elated at the response his latest was getting. He was tickled to hear that, the night before we met up, Roger Ebert had thrown a hissy fit at the prospect of not managing to make it into a packed press screening of the film.

Haynes was also remaining rather patient, seeing as a legion of film critics covering the festival, who should have known better, were posing the question: who was Douglas Sirk?

“Sirk was quite simply an amazing filmmaker,” Haynes repeated. “And it always makes me a bit nervous, talking about what a gay sensibility is, but though he wasn’t gay, I always felt there was a strong gay sensibility about his work. There was Rock Hudson, of course, but there was also Ross Hunter, who produced Sirk’s films, who was very flamboyantly gay. Basically, this German intellectual [Sirk] was directing these very surface, fluffy films that in fact were laced with social critiques. It was there, but not really stated.” (It seems we’re in the season of Sirk recognition; there’s a scene in the current release 8 Mile where Kim Basinger watches a TV while the racial-divide epic Imitation of Life screens.)

Back to the future

Creating and conceiving of Far From Heaven meant rewinding and fast forwarding at once, Haynes explains. The director wanted to infuse the film with a homosexual text—something Sirk had wanted to do, Haynes notes, but hadn’t been able to because of censorship constraints—while recreating the ’50s of Sirk’s universe as closely as possible. Colour coding—or should I say Technicolor coding—was a priority for Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman. “We had to shoot the film in autumn,” Haynes says. “The colours of the leaves were imperative. And the production design was inspired by the rich designs and decorative surfaces of Sirk’s movies. Those houses, the clothes, the colours, they filled in what the characters couldn’t say about themselves. They’re beautiful, perfect and flawless, but they’re also oppressive.”

Sirk’s respect for women and women’s films was also crucial. “Back in the ’50s, they were looked down upon quite a bit,” says Haynes.

“I didn’t really think I knew much about these films,” adds Julianne Moore. “But you know, they are omnipresent. The thing about growing up in the U.S. is, if you turn on the TV and start watching the million-dollar movie, chances are you’d be watching what they used to refer to as a women’s movie. It’s impossible to get away from. I knew more about them than I thought.”

Moore channels Jane Wyman and Lana Turner at once with her performance (sure to nab her at the very least an Oscar nomination), delivering her lines in an anal-retentive pitch that evokes the period without any campiness. But for all that things have changed in terms of attitudes towards women and women’s films, Haynes says the industry made him feel like things weren’t all that different.

“A film about a woman is a financial risk—unless Julia Roberts is in it. Movies are still usually about men. Women who get Oscar-nominated roles are usually in about a third of the movies we see. It’s still an incredibly male-dominated industry and market. That was our biggest difficulty, was trying to get more money. But from my perspective, you learn so much more from the movies about women than you do from movies about guys blowing each other up.”

Talking back

Adding to the film’s out-of-time, otherworldly sensibility is its dialogue. “I used language almost exclusively from the movies, not from real life,” says Haynes. “And what that really is, in a way, is putting faith into a certain naïveté. I wasn’t trying to update, or editorialize, but rather to give it an honest reappraisal. And I wanted to see what that does to audience expectations. The idea of making the word ‘fuck’ shocking in a movie today is probably impossible to imagine. But when Quaid says it, I think it is. The whole thing was this balance of just the right rupture, of just the right deviation from that period.

“Constraint, restraint and subtlety were all very important. But a certain kind of restraint. You have to keep it earnest. Everything is on the surface, there isn’t that psychological, naturalistic explanation from before—there’s an innocent directness about the acting.”

Haynes touches on one of the key differences between character in this kind of film and contemporary studio films. “These films aren’t really privy to the kind of psychological explanations that we bring to movies today, where a character gains a kind of knowledge at the end of the movie from their experiences and can articulate it. Most of the time in these films, the subjects get moved around by forces in their society. I’m more in favour of this kind of character, rather than characters who demonstrate a heroic resolution. When you show that, you’re kind of saying that everyone has that within their capacity and that if you’re not heroic in your life, you somehow deserve that.”

Haynes says part of the impetus for hearkening back to the ’50s was his feeling that 2002 has more in common with ’57 than we’d like to think. Yes, there are differences, he concedes. “Actors in ’57 would have freaked over this script. Herbert Hoover would have had a field day with me. And the Hays Code would never have let this happen.”

Isn’t it true that now you can show just about anything you want? Haynes pauses.

“I suppose, in many cases. But what’s at stake now is emotional trust, in yourself. The cynicism, the removing of yourself as a viewer is so common. That negates the possibility of feeling something. It’s much easier to be cool, to step back and strike a pose than to really feel something. We all cringe at that Robin Williams style of sentimentality. But when you look back at the investment we had when we really believed in something, that requires a different kind of feeling. If you look at American films of the ’70s, they were heartfelt because they grew out of something political, something that people believed in.

“I think that’s something we’ve lost.” :

Far From Heaven opens Friday, Nov. 15

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