Independent Perspective News

Todd Haynes is back with Far from heaven, a Douglas Sirk-like melodrama, euphoric in style and color, in which sexual desires undermine an American family's happiness.

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In only a few hours, Cathy Whitaker, the protagonist of Todd Haynes' new movie, suffers not just one but two successive epiphanies: first she finds her husband making out with a gentleman in his office; and the next day she understands the only human being capable of consoling her is her black gardener. From that moment, the Whitakers, up to then a role model for their neighbors in Hartford, Connecticut, become an anathema.

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Double Game

The weirdest about Far from heaven, is not so much what the movie says as the format that Haynes chose to say it. Taking a typical family and pushing it to invert the social mandate's prescription is not so far from what John Waters or Almodóvar have been doing for more than twenty years now. But whereas films such as Pink Flamingos address the audience's complicity, Far from heaven is a G movie which fully supports such a encoded and popular genre as the melodrama.

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The power of identification of Far from heaven probably resides in the universal feature of its subject -the conflict between public and private, desire and prejudice, person and character-, as well as in the fact that the movie is based on a pre-encoded dramaturgy.

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There's a permanent double game in the film (identical to the one Douglas Sirk used to practice in the melodramas that served Haynes as models) between empathy and distance, truthfulness and irony, straightforwardness and criticism, which gives it a complexity that's increasingly usual in contemporary cinema.

Educating the viewer

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In that sense, Far from heaven is -as were its models- a real school for viewers, as it pushes them beyond their preexisting ideas, out from themselves for once and into a relationship with their fellow men through the truth about their own condition. This way of relating to his material makes Todd Haynes an eccentric compared to the majority of his contemporary peers, who tend to relate to their characters from a position of superiority, scorn and despite, summoning the audience to make themselves comfortable in an irony of absolutes.

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Haynes never forgets the fact that his characters are social beings, conditioned by the values that rule the environment they live in. And here the melodrama -a genre classically condemned for its alleged tendency to mystification and solipsism- revels its deep critical potential.

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"The domestic culture of the 50s was a harsh repressor of women", declared Haynes to the newspaper Libération. "In the post-war America it was women, not men, who were supposed to embody the most perfect image of the value system".

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It's no news that the melodrama is one of the favorable genre for the visual stylization and extensive unfolding of the whole catalogue of the cinematographic language. When copying movies by Douglas Sirk, what Haynes does with Far from heaven is taking the stylizing impulse inherent to the genre to its most extreme expression.