Far From Heaven2011
by John Gill
Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far From Heaven has been hailed as an homage to 1950s Hollywood melodrama, although anyone tempted to take the film at face value should be warned that it aims to subvert as much as celebrate that genre. Impeccably constructed, with a care for detail unknown in films from the era, it sets out to make key themes from the genre -- romance across racial barriers and class lines, and perhaps the period's greatest taboo, romance between members of the same sex -- utterly explicit, when half a century ago those themes had to be encoded in allusion and metaphor. Haynes took as his main source Douglas Sirk's 1955 classic, All That Heaven Allows, although Far From Heaven also references Rainer Werner Fassbinder's bleak portrayal of interracial love, Fear Eats the Soul...