Displaying items by tag: Guido Santi

CHRIS & DON: A LOVE STORY

US, 2007, 90 minutes, Colour.

Don Bachardy.

Directed by Guido Santi, Tina Mascara.

The Chris and Don of the title are British writer, Christopher Isherwood, and Californian artist, Don Bachardy. Isherwood achieved some fame with his writings, especially his Berlin stories and his time there in the 1930s, adapted for the theatre and for the screen as Cabaret.

For audiences interested in Christopher Isherwood, this is a portrait, something of his history, moving from England to Europe, to Germany, and then finding a long-time home in California. It is not, as some bloggers complained and wanted, a study of Isherwood as an author. However, in fact, the audience does learn quite a bit about Isherwood himself, his talent, his writings, fiction, and for many years, his attention to his diaries (quotations read throughout the documentary by Michael York, star of Cabaret).

Isherwood died in 1986 but appears in many home movie sequences as well as interviews and his meeting with literary celebrities. Christopher Isherwood was a gay man, not troubled in being out in society, and linked, as here in photos, with significant gay authors of the 20^th century, E. M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote.

But, in fact, this film belongs to Donald Bachardy. He had encountered Christopher Isherwood when he was in his teens, at a gay beach. Some comment about Bachardy being young but the sharing the relationship for 34 years. The film is very much about that relationship, quotations from Isherwood, Bachardy being at the centre of this film, 22 years after Isherwood’s death, Bachardy in his 70s.

He appears in a lot of home movie/ video material, but now explaining to camera the situations of those times and his feelings, the relationship and the development. Isherwood was something also of a father figure, encouraging Bachardy in his art studies. As an artist, Bachardy has great skill in his sketches-portraits – and, in Isherwood’s final days, sketching him even up to 9 times a day, showing so many of these portraits to camera.

There are a number of interviews, especially in connection with the Isherwood’s interest in film, he and Bachardy writing the screenplay for the Frankenstein film which starred Michael Sarrazin. British director, John Boorman, has studied Isherwood’s writings and diaries and makes comments. There are several appearances by Leslie Caron, a friend of the couple.

Throughout the film there are animated sketches illustrating the relationship between the couple, the relationship between a cat and a horse.

There is always the question of Christopher Isherwood’s his talent, his status in the literary world. However, his relationship with Dan Bachardy over so many years is significant in the history of society’s awareness of, acceptance of, homosexuality and gay relationships.