Chris & Don: A Love Story (2007)

Why so much hype?

Excellent but underrated film

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This movie can easily be seen as a meditation. It is a kind of wonderful meditation on impermanence, the transient nature of youth, beauty and health, on the inevitability of loss and finally on the Triumph of Death. An art of losing and dealing with sorrow.It is not often in our days that someone has the time and is being allowed a slow pace when talking to you as in this film. Especially not on very subtle and intimate matters. That is praiseworthy. Not often either do you see love treated spiritually. Not often do you see someone follow a life partner to the very gate of Death and past. Making drawings of the corpse, lovingly, without disgust or even crying. That is an impressive remaining within reality.Highly recommendable.

I stumbled upon this documentary on the Sundance Channel and the name Don Bachardy sounded familiar to me so I began watching. Then I realized that he was the artist who authored a book called "Stars In His Eyes" that dealt with many famous film personalities that posed for him. Each actor/actress had their portrait sketched and he wrote interesting details about the experience of setting up these meetings and how the sittings went.So I watched, and discovered that he was Christopher Irsherwood's lover since he was a youth, meeting the writer when he was an unformed adolescent and quickly becoming his lifelong companion. It's a touching documentary, detailing the closeness of their relationship which began in the Hollywood of the 1950s at a time when discretion had to be uppermost in the minds of anyone contemplating a same sex relationship.Bachardy was fascinated by the many well-known people that Irsherwood's associations included--everyone from Montgomery Clift to Julie Harris to Leslie Caron--and quickly became a part of that world when Irsherwood sponsored his education as an artist. Later, he would be doing portraits of these famous people and have his own opening at a gallery.But the story deals mainly with the intensity of their close relationship over the years despite some difficulties due to their age difference. However, I found some of Bachardy's choices rather morbid, such as the endless fascination with sketching the dying partner during his final months, again and again.Bachardy himself does much of the narration and ends by saying that he's reading Irsherwood's diary from the back toward the beginning because he can't wait to get to the part where they first meet.Make of it what you will--it's all there for the viewer to ponder.

Calvin A. Tripp in his book The Homoxexual Matrix comments that gay couples are better than others at spanning differences. This story certainly shows that. When Christopher Isherwood met Don Bachardy he was 46 and Don was 16; he was a famous writer and Don was unknown and unformed; he was from the English landed gentry and Don's father was a worker in the aerospace industry. They met through Ted, Don's older brother, also gay--on the "queer" beach of Santa Monica. Chris slept with Ted. Two years later in 1951 he slept with Don. They bonded for life. They stayed together till Isherwood's death 34 years later. As director John Boorman says, "Of all the people I came to know in Los Angeles, their marriage was the only one that endured." People said it wouldn't. They were wrong. In the Fifties, they went out as an openly gay couple--which even the sophisticates of Hollywood where Chris was by then a successful writer weren't used to--because they were committed to each other, and Christopher Isherwood recognized the importance of not hiding their sexuality or their love.Isherwood was partly a father to Don, who needed to discover who he was. In the course of this process Don very early on adapted Chris's ways of speaking and mannerisms--so completely that Boorman felt as if Chris had "cloned" himself. Then when Don's artistic talent emerged Chris sent him to art school, where he was a dedicated and successful student, and gave him the support and encouragement he needed. Perhaps as some say Don's subsequent success as a portrait artist was "why" the relationship endured--certainly it is how Don moved out from under Chris's shadow--but in fact the relationship was hard in its early years because Don was looked down on as nothing but Chris's boy toy, a blank. Then when Don realized all the wild oats Chris had sown in those extra thirty years, he revolted and there was a rough patch when Don threatened to go off with somebody else.During this time Isherwood went north for three months as a guest lecturer, which led Don to realize how important his older lover was to him and how relatively unimportant the new person was.Chris and Don: a Love Story is a marvel of seamless and thorough construction that fills us in on Isherwood's story before Don, his family and school origins, Berlin and the Cabaret years, his involvement in Hollywood society (Aldous Huxley, Swami Prabhavananda, Stravinsky, et al.). Likewise Don's life before Chris and after, including an ugly homophobic encounter with Joseph Cotton for Don). There are important perspectives from Boorman, Leslie Caron, briefly by Lisa Minelli (Chris found her Sally Bowles too "professional" but was glad the film was popular), and others. There are useful comments by Isherwood archive-keepers and chroniclers, home photos of Don and Chris in early days together, archival film interviews with Chris, Isherwood diaries read aloud by Michael York, and above all plenty of time spent with Don as he is today, a trim and vigorous 74, puttering around the sunny, pretty hillside house where he's lived since he moved there with Chris in the 1950's, painting handsome nude men; working out at the gym, reminiscing about his thirty-four years with Christopher Isherwood.It's enough to see how Bachardy's eyes still light up when he tells about his first meeting with Chris, how often he laughs remembering things, to know theirs was a happy and enduring love. During the last days when Isherwood was dying of prostate cancer, Don did as many as nine or ten big drawings of him a day, and then drew his corpse. Chris would have said that was what an artist would do, Don says. "And that is what an artist did do." When Chris died, Don set about reading Chris's diaries, starting from the present and working back. He couldn't wait to get to the moment when they met.There are many interesting details. An important theme is Don's and his family's early fascination with movies and movie stars and how Chris's many acquaintances in the world of movies fed into that and dazzled him--till reality came in when he discovered at a shoot where he was a humiliated extra, that a certain Italian lady star...farted, like anybody else. It's clear that over two decades since Chris's death, Don still thrives--but not all questions about his present life are answered (who does he hang out with?). Also missing is any sign of Chris's longtime friend Julie Harris.There are a couple of unnecessary things: murky reenactments of scenes such as the one where Don and Chris huddled in Morocco during a bad trip after meeting Paul Bowles in Tangiers--a description would have been enough; and as has been noted, the animations of the pair's kitty/pony drawings representing themselves are a little too cute. Still, this is a handsome as well as a touching piece of work.

Presented at the Telluride Film Festival, this is one of the most touching, romantic and cinematically innovative movies I've seen in a long time. First of all, let's not forget this is a documentary, with all the visual and narrative difficulties associated with the genre. Second, it's the love story between two men. Yet, it is more emotionally involving than if it was a fictionalized version, and this is because as you watch it you are aware all that is told is absolutely true. Notwithstanding this, the movie never indulges on the aspect of homosexuality, but it looks at this as just an extraordinary story of passion between two persons bound both emotionally and artistically. Never boring, not even for one second, "Chris and Don", produced and directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, is an original way to tell a love story by mixing current footage with archive material and cartoons that results in a coherent and compelling storytelling. Reminiscent in style of "The Kid Stays in the Picture" and similar documentaries centering on real personalities, it has a beautiful musical score and benefits from a rhythmic, involving editing.