FILM COMMENT HOME
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BUY THE NEW ISSUE!
ART & INDUSTRY BY AMY TAUBIN:
NEW: FATIH AKIN'S HEAD-ON AND DANIEL BURMAN'S LOST EMBRACE
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
SIGN UP FOR
E-NEWS
READ MARCH E-NEWS
FORUM
ARCHIVE
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
WALTER READE THEATER
FILMLINC.COM HOME
COMING IN March/April 2005:
Dustin Hoffman
Bulle Ogier by Gary Indiana
Hirokazu Kore-eda by Chuck Stephens
Amitabh Bachchan by David Chute
Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl by Kent Jones
And much more
FILM COMMENT
September/October
IN EVERY DREAM HOME
By AMY TAUBIN
Todd Haynes's latest film, Far from Heaven, is a reworking of Douglas Sirk's 1955 film All That Heaven Allows, previously remade in 1971 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. In Sirk's film, an upper-middle-class widow falls in love with her gardener. Shunned by her children and her friends, she breaks off the relationship only to realize, perhaps too late, that she made the wrong decision. Far From Heaven adds the complication of homosexuality to the destabilizing force of interracial intimacy. An anti-Pleasantville, it short-circuits nostalgia by showing us the ugly social reality masked by now-fetishized Fifties surfaces and objects. It is such a blatantly aestheticized film that it seems almost inconceivable for it to be radically political as well, but that's exactly what it is. Just as Safe was a response to the AIDS crisis in which the term AIDS went unmentioned, Far From Heaven is a furious denunciation of the return to the rampant power of the military-industrial complex.
You can read the complete version of this article in the September/October print edition of Film Comment.
