"Safe" - C or D ?

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).