"Safe" - C or D ?

I love the way Julianne Moore looks directly at the screen/ mirror /YOU - and says she loves you - is she telling you as the viewer or herself as a reflection? Nothing else Todd haynes or julianne Moore have made has approached this power. There is nothing like it. Most movies, Even other intelligent films, signal to you what kind of emotion you should be going through this one leaves everything hanging. i keep going back to it.

I also found myself question their marital relationship - was it even a "relationship" ? Sometimes I thought he genuinely loved her, but its not something you can put your finger on with any certainty. Was he only being used by her for security - another way to feel "safe," - with the guy at the dance representing someone she truly could form an emotional connection with?

I think it takes on added significance if you live in SoCal. I live 10 minutes from the valley (ack!) and have been in those lawnless, hilly Sherman Oaks neighborhoods where everything seems so perfect and pictureqsue, and yet so unreal

Yes it leaves you hanging, but as most people who have been hung will confirm, beiung hung is a rather unpleasant situation to be in.

There was some merit to the cinematography which did absolutely nothing for me to like it. I think Haynes has a real problem with audience identification, which was equally apparent in Belvet Goldmine. I think in many ways he went the other way with Far From heaven, but I felt it was a much better film for that. Safe just seemed more than a little bit obvious with its metaphor, the isolationism of American personified in a ginger Californian (and equally the isolationism that we all accept). It did not seem as clever as it thought it was, and Moore - rather than nuanced was alternately hysterical and flat. I always knew she was acting.

I didn't like Velvet Goldmine that much, as it was disappointing to see how even such a colorful film could meander around so much to become flamboyantly boring. I didn't feel a level of emotional identification with any of the characters, as Pete is right to point out; they were just there. I think Far From Heaven was better, but the unease and tension between the intentional-or-not comedic aspects with the dramatics was kind of off-putting for me, as was the overblown self-consciousness of the whole thing. Overall I still liked it, and Moore's [double] performance really saved that one: she wrung real emotion out of a prototypical character, which is not something everyone can achieve successfully.

I also love the ending, how he brings us to this changing point in the characters' lives and asks us to make the decision along with the characters. We can see the difficult choice and play out the final scene in many ways, and all we are left with is our personal resolution and the evidence that supports it. This film is fantastic for group viewing and debate.

Bosh!

Vic, I think the important thing to consider with VG is: Did you find the characters hott?

uh? latex fetish suits?! where did you get that from? they're all in sloppy leezhoorwear, surely?

...anyway this is the key scene in the film for me - after the dinner they get up to dance and one member of the community asks carol to make a speech, since it'd her birthday; she says something like...

"oh i just want to thank you for having this meal and i [...long pause] just want to say... that i really am beginning to love myself... and i really hated myself before you know?... and im so happy everyone is dealing with this illness... cos it is an illness, and aids and [she becomes inceasingly aware that all eyes are on her].... just reading labels in grocery stores cos thats important..." and she kind of dries up and loses track of her thoughts.

The reason its interesting is because she begins relatively confidently then what she says kinda evloves into Oprah-speak and she falters - the more she speaks the less articulate she becomes, more doubtful and conversely more like the real carol. Its one of the truest things i have ever seen in a movie. You never see that kind of inarticulacy depicted on fim or even on T.V.

You're fired. (Wait, I didn't employ you anyway.)

"Fuck you, man!"

I watched this again on cable recently, and I was just floored (again) by how good Moore's performance is.

In "Safe," on the other hand, the alienation is spread out across all the characters (I love Carol's husband, the confused deadbeat) and in both situations -- the Valley and the retreat. So it's not just about "soulless suburbia," the Valley, being a housewife, etc. (although that's obviously part of it, and the part that hits you the hardest for 2/3 of the movie) -- it's also got that really excellent final third, which people in this thread have discussed really well.

I like how even the salesman/founder of the retreat ("I look out there and I see... people learning to live again!" clapclapclap), who sets your sleaze alarm off right away, and who seems fairly phony in his one-on-one interaction with Carol, doesn't seem totally, unambiguously phony. it's a great thing how the viewer's natural cynicism toward the retreat, and the people there, is sort of short-circuited by how it's no more or less weird than the rest of the movie; and how Carol's fate may heartbreaking (depending on how you choose to "read" the end of the movie), but how she also hasn't necessarily been a "victim" of anybody -- even though she's inarticulate, and so not-in-control of her environment that she has to totally surrender control to others.

And I prefer Rosemary's Baby (despite the loony devil scene which spoils it).

anyway lots of good things to say on this thread. i agree with sam j. and douglas.

but i also think the v.v. poll thing isn't an accident...this film represents a kind of mainstreaming (or at least art-house prominence) of certain strains of academic thought which are quite talked-about in the milieu that the v.v. epitomizes. so it makes sense that it should be the "best film of the '90s" in that context. i think haynes is brilliant at realizing certain ideas in *visual* terms. and anyway he's a natural, i think: the cutaway to the fox in the brush is marvelously timed for maximum chilling effect, even as its meaning is charged through with total ambiguity.

and i believe sam j's story has some relevance, about haynes comments re: environmental concerns. "safe" is set in los angeles and feels in particular an austere commetary on the ecological dangers of living here: the freeways, the polluted and noxious atmosphere, the crowded, lawnless housing communities, the artificial decor of the air-brushed interiors, the constant emphasis on appearance and grooming. yet i don't think the film just simplistically blames the external environment without reversing the question a bit: for all the time she worried about the appearance of her home as she went about altering the furniture, etc, it was not until the psychiatrist asked her "what is the problem w/ you?" that she began to confront herself as perhaps being the source of the disease, and started looking at it as an internal thing

the (possible, or one in a series- we wouldn't know) culmination of that self-confrontation was the most chilling moment in the very film: the very end, when she looks straight into the camera and says "i love you." we don't know if she really means it, or if its just a stark reminder of how she'll never really mean it, but it's so significant because it could just be the first moment in her life that she truly feels "safe" - and alone with herself. i know i'm contradicting my first post re: the ending now, but this thread has suceeded in making my mind go back and forth, even more than the images of the film did =)

It bothers me that "allergic to modern life" became kind of a tagline/selling point for Safe, because it seems so pat and trite when isolated like that -- like the sort of thing you'd happen to see on a poster for, say, a new-age retreat. It worked well as one of the possible explanations (on a micro-level) for her mysterious illness, but as a selling point the phrase distracts from the scary horror of Carol's situation (suddenly getting very sick and feeling powerless to stop it) and actually provides a diagnosis for something that needs to remain open-ended in order for the movie to work.

for some reason, although it's a brief scene, i always remember when carol and her husband and son are having dinner and the son is, i think, talking about guns and so on, and the husband half-heartedly chastises him. it's a tiny moment but it seems to open up the story a bit, suggest a malady that goes beyond just carol.

they were having dinner and son was doing a report on the violence in la and wqas pretty gory in his details, and carol said she thinks its too graphic

I'm not faulting you... it's the marketing strategy I take issue with.

contrast with the black woman carol meets at the new age resort, the first one to really be friendly to her and show her around. but i suppose he had to do that, put a visible black character at the retreat, or else he would've been making a comment on the "illness" and race without meaning to

i'm still not decided on the usefulness of having these characters enact certain dated stereotypes.... certainly they meet different ends in haynes's film than in sirk's....

in haynes's film, the characters are defeated by the rules, unable to transcend them. in this sense the film can be seen simply as a commentary on the impossibility of transcendence--is that obvious and facile and redundant in the cynicism-sated 21st century, or is it a point that needs making again?

re: transcendece and the ending, even though i haven't seen that sirk original, i think it had more to do w/ the last century than this one, since maybe haynes was commenting instead on how in the less benevolent universe behind sirk's stylized facades was an unhappily-ever-after world where desires didn't really come true (and homosexuality was more than always implied, etc) -> that the 20th century was a bit more of an empty, unrealized dream than we'd depicted at the time/we'd like to think

Creating a film commenting on Sirk, be it an homage or a pastiche, is an exercise in fetishism.

as i noted on the sirk thread, i think this is wrong. the production code was not set up to police bourgeois ideology. and anyway (this is my main point) i'm not sure sirk intended anything so damning/withering/'subversive' as some of his latterday fans claim. i don't think sirk's own intentions and the prevailing attitudes in hollywood were at odds. i think he had like-minded producers and screenwriters much (not all) of the time. i think the films are more confused and contradictory and emphathetic than certain post-fassbinder characterizations allow.

i think we're throwing the word 'brechtian' around without much care. defamiliarization is what art does--that idea doesn't begin or end with brecht. sirk was ambivalent abour brecht and i really don't see his films as employing 'brechtian' devices in any sense, unless you stretch the definition of 'brechtian' to the point where it becomes banal, no longer useful.

did i mention i love sirk's movies? because i do.

That's all true (what Sirk wants us to think at the end of All That Heaven Allows is rather a muddle) but it doesn't discount the fact that his films needed (thrived?) under the Production Code. You couldn't make a Douglas Sirk film today.

I saw Safe for the third time tonight, and actually liked it considerably more than previously. (Not "best film of the '90s"-level, though.) No idea whether my getting seriously ill in the interim accounts for any of that.

Haynes did a Q&A after and he doesn't remotely seem to "hold the characters in contempt," not Carol at least. He admits that keeping her remote to some degree was a strategy.

I saw Safe for the third time tonight, and actually liked it considerably more than previously. (Not "best film of the '90s"-level, though.)

I had the same reaction when I watched the beautiful Criterion Blu-ray.

amateurist OTM upthread about Sirk. I still regard FFH with suspicion though.

I watch Carol on Tuesday.

i'm sick and feeling rundown and dreading a busy couple of weeks coming up so i put this on right after waking up from a nap. hadn't seen it in 9 or 10 years. such a brilliant, hypnotic, enveloping movie- i get sick a lot (tho nothing as wild as the '20th century allergy' in the movie or something like morgellons - i just have a weak immune system and get colds and flus and viruses and infections a lot)- and this movie really captures the alienation and isolation and frustration of being around healthy people while you're sick, especially if it's psychosomatic. like it becomes a rain on their parade, or your illness a cry for attention, or obviously weakness. the sound design in the first half is stunning, and haynes nails that repulsive pastel mid/late 80s aesthetic, and tho i dont find the suburban ennui commentary very interesting atm it's done very well here.

this would make a great double feature with synecdoche, new york. i saw that at the end of 2008 so i must've seen safe earlier that year, because i didn't realize peter friedman is in both (the main wrenwood guy in safe, the first doctor in synecdoche, the one that stitches caden's head and gets freaked out that caden mishears him say 'ophthalmologist' as 'neurologist'). also noticed dean norris (hank on breaking bad) plays one of the movers early in the movie.

this and carol are neck and neck for my favorite haynes movies. absolutely one of our greatest living directors, at least in america.

classic movie

This is the best movie about AIDS, maybe the only AIDS movie with any wit.

As a Sirk pastiche, infinitely better than Far From Heaven, the pink/grey/turquoise suburban palette, the romantic yet realist recasting of Sirk's passive housewife-with-help heroine in the first act. As a queering of Sirk, far more productive than Fassbinder/Water's campness. The tragedy of domestic containment and its proximity to the tabloid/daytime vehicles of hysteria and AIDS panic. This stifling/prurient environment is v palpable in the first part of the film. V foucauldian.

Disease as "Identity," is the key observation of the film I think, and very prescient in understanding the way narratives around AIDS activism were moving in the mid-'90s.

What the film seems to understand very lucidly is the strand of individualism that characterised many of the more radical activist positions (within act-up etc) of the day. For instance, the way the film lampoons the current of embracing new-agey/alternative medical approaches by people with aids at that time, both a reaction of blind panic to something that was, pre-antiretrovirals, still without a cure, but also an attempt to remake the relationship between medicine and subject. And I think the somewhat ambiguous legacy of aids activism in shaping biomedical discourses and welfare discourses ever since, seems, well not addressed by this film, but certainly glimpsed and teasingly played out to an impressive degree.

julianne moore is a much better jane wyman here than in far from heaven, which is blunt and fundamentally pointless I think. Only Mildred Pierce and Carol are close for me. I could never be arsed watching velvet goldmine though. I can't bear bowie or iggy pop or any of that

his new one was pretty good, if slight. Safe and Carol are his masterpieces. although i should watch I'm Not There again

plax, you know i love you, but FFH is both blunt and pointed.

I don't much care for glam but enjoyed Velvet Goldmine as a scandal sheet/research paper.

yeah, its a good film, its nowhere near as good as safe. also, safe is the only one that seems to have an entirely original look, so many of his other films aspire to a pastiche of post-war technicolor, but safe finds a pictorial equivalent that is blandly "contemporary" instead of revelling in period which is comparatively dull imo

i do think safe is his only "great" film

d.p. for Safe seems to have virtually disappeared

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Nepomniaschy

I'd accept Safe as his greatest film, if only to sidestep any more conversation about Far From Heaven and Carol (the latter of which I still liked).