Morelia International Film Festival

Todd Haynes is undoubtedly one of the most adventurous, imaginative and talented American filmmakers to have emerged in the last two decades. In the early 1990s, as the writer­director of the Jean Genet­ inspired Poison (1990), Haynes was rightly acclaimed as a leading light of what came to be known as 'the New Queer Cinema'. But while that praise was richly deserved and accurate, it was also perhaps unfairly limiting. Pigeon­holing and typecasting have their drawbacks, and while much of Haynes' work is clearly informed to some degree by a gay sensibility and gay concerns, one should underestimate neither his ambitions nor his achievements. He's not only 'a great gay filmmaker'; he's a great filmmaker, period, and as with any major auteur, his work is of considerable contemporary relevance, interest and import.

Both formally and thematically, Haynes' films are original, distinctive and often properly provocative. To his various and extremely varied case­studies of how individual identities and lives are shaped, stunted and stifled by the pressures and prejudices of society at large, he brings wit, intellectual rigour, political awareness, stylistic subtlety and dramaturgical sophistication. He may deal with serious issues surrounding notions of normality, deviancy, sickness, transgression and punishment, but the insights he offers into sexual politics, social structures and the other forces exerting an influence on our lives are consistently couched in highly engaging and deeply articulate forms of filmic language. Haynes clearly understands when to work within the confines of traditional genre, and when to cross boundaries; Safe and Far from Heaven each displayed an acute awareness of the advantages of remaining faithful (in many if not all respects) to the 'rules' of the classical Hollywood melodrama, whereas Poison, Velvet Goldmine, and I'm Not There, like Haynes' short films, benefited from playing fast and loose with a variety of carefully combined generic conventions.

Few other contemporary filmmakers have explored the tricky, tangled, even fraught relationships between our private and public selves, between the personal and the political, with such spiky intelligence and stylistic flair. Haynes' writing is constantly inflected with telling ironies and teasing ambiguities, while his direction is fluid, bold and, it would seem, almost infinitely versatile in its inventive, eloquent deployment of genre, colour, cutting and composition. He is also a master of allusion, be the references cinematic, musical, literary, historical or whatever, so that his films constantly resonate with echoes evocative of other works, other meanings, above and beyond the particular narrative at hand. Watching Far from Heaven, one may recall not only Douglas Sirk's films - not just All That Heaven Allows but Imitation of Life and others -but also Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul. Velvet Goldmine, meanwhile, brings to mind Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed, Roxy Music and numerous other music acts, not to mention Citizen Kane, A Hard Day's Night, several musicals and melodramas, and the writings of Oscar Wilde.



All of which would merely be 'clever' if the films didn't work on their own terms; happily, because we don't need to notice or under­ stand all the references, they do succeed. Moreover, if we do get at least some of the references, the films succeed on several levels at once. Never merely a nostalgist or a namechecker, Haynes uses allusion to enhance our understanding of how his films relate both to cultural tradition and to wider notions of history. Because he is in one way or another dealing with the world we live in, he wants to remind us about what has gone before, so that we might better grasp where we are now and how we got here. Hence his fascination with the recent past, and his distinctly modern and highly personal way of revisiting it.

Like the Dylan of I'm Not There, Haynes the artist seems almost to have several identities; that much is especially evident in the way many of his films operate simultaneously both as relatively straightforward narratives that directly engage our emotions and as ironic, slightly detached commentaries about themselves as cinematic artifacts. That particular duality is in keeping with Haynes' abiding interest in the gap between 'reality' and 'appearance' a space of no small significance in an era seemingly obsessed with celebrity, success and the media. It's yet one more reason why Haynes is among the most fascinating and rewarding filmmakers working today.

by Geoff Andrew