User reviews

For how unusual and "scandalous" the love story portrayed in this movie can be (or rather, could have been at the time the facts took place), the way it is narrated by the film-making and producing duo of Guido Santi and Tina Mascara is so sophisticated, gentle and harmonious that it really brings you back to the atmosphere in the most romantic Hollywood movies of the fifties. Perhaps it's because the sentimental relationship between Isherwood and Bachardy was mediated by such an incredible artistic exchange that it elevated their passion to the ranks of a work of art. Or perhaps it's because the authors have wisely elected to look at their love with unpretentious discretion, as if the camera was always attempting to remain unobtrusive enough to ensure the utmost authenticity in Bachardy's moving and vivid memories of their past together. Overall, this touching documentary has bestowed me with a higher feeling of satisfaction than a regular movie as I realised that real love does not only exist in fiction, but occurs, if rarely, in reality. Quite an extraordinary experience in movie-making, this one.

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.

It looks like we will finally be able to watch this masterpiece documentary in theaters as distributor Zeitgeist has picked up the Miami Festival winner for a limited release. Produced by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, a team of longtime documentary authors whose "Mandala" revealed a few years ago a very sophisticated talent in visual storytelling, "Chris & Don" is the love story between famous playwright Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy in the golden years of Hollywood, with exclusive interviews and footage with actors and other personalities. Although Isherwood and Bachardy's was a homosexual love during a time when these relationships were looked at with criticism even in the more liberal California, the movie is somehow capable of setting the sexual factor aside and focus instead on the depth of the protagonists' personality. By the end of the movie you feel so intimate with both, that it is almost natural to want to know more about them and their art. A refined, well directed portrait and an opportunity for exemplary film-making that should easily captivate audiences.

This documentary covers a lot of ground: sexuality, aging, death, spirituality, art, literature, war, celebrity, alternative life styles, tragedy, mental health, drug use…and love. Pure and simple love.

Now I went to this movie reluctantly. The subject matter of the lives of the famous has worn—if not all of us—me down with the 24 hour news cycle. Christopher Isherwood's literary contributions were more a bridge than, say, the works of W.H. Auden which stand alone in any age. To unveil, posthumously, his private life examining the testament of his living lover, I was braced for something like testimony contesting Rock Hudson's estate.

But, I was very wrong.

Whether you can sit and hear the word "queer" and flinch or not (in any of its incantations either pejorative or defiance), it quickly doesn't matter. There is such a wealth of first hand material (photos, film footage, paintings, drawings, interviews) we don't have time to judge (as I was prepared to do) the age difference of the two subjects or their lifestyles.

Whatever the staying power of Isherwood's written words, his legacy as a gentle human being is forever preserved in this film. And whether or not Don Bachardy was "abused" by an older man or not, we're so dazzled—as the young Bachardy must have been—by the world he's invited into with Isherwood, we don't have time to sit in judgment of anyone. And that's a good thing, because at the end of the day, and at the end of this film—as at the end of these people's lives—it's for them to say whether their story was one of fulfilled love or something pathological. And what is revealed here by both the diaries of Christopher Isherwood and the loving testimony of his partner cannot be denied.

I had some quibbles with the choices made by the filmmakers, however. The use of animation seems like unnecessary padding. Only once (during a rough period in the relationship) is it well used, and the score is patchy. When jazz from the period is used it matches what we see on screen; but the original music seems generic. My biggest objection was using actors to stage some crucial events. There is such a wealth of archival footage that I began to doubt which was real and what was staged. I think using actors sells everyone--including the audience--short. What the principals have to say is so powerful, we didn't need what has become an almost obligatory trend in documentary films.

The interviews are all carefully chosen and never intrude into anything we'd call inappropriate or salacious. And the central character here, Don Bacarady, is allowed the freedom to say what he wants (most of it very funny) and he holds little back.

It's a great love story, and it's told at a time when our Country is considering whether or not it should sanction same sex marriage. Well, there's nothing here that would point towards not doing that. Yet no one on the screen has an agenda or an ax to grind. I think it was during an interview with Leslie Caron when she remembers something Isherwood says—he delays his death because "Don isn't ready"—that I realized this was no ordinary love story, it was a true love story. And it's heartbreaking and a mind-opener. Go see it.

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.

What is love? And how does it exercise us? As, regardless of age or experience, we grope, or dance, or trot, or what you will, our way in life, is there not at some point, for some of us, a deep impact encounter with another person that challenges our expectations, our fears, even our love? Let alone the fact that, for example, a friend's fleeting remark can trigger an unpleasant memory. That much for frailty, for I do not want to deliver any kind of portentous philosophical or psychoanalytic sketch as a response to the film, but there was one thing, one thing if you may, that touched me profoundly, and although it shows, I think, an immense refinement and spontaneity of affect, it is of the simplest logical necessity!

First things first! you may say, if you still read this.

Like, this is a documentary concerning two men, two artists, in love, in a relationship for more than thirty years, along with geography, exile, backgrounds, celebrities, chronology, hilarity, love and its discontents making for a (dual) portrait.

Like Chris Isherwood, a somewhat canonical writer, mostly for his Berlin stories, living the 20th century passion in an insouciant pre-fascist Germany, ends up in Hollywwod, California coming from rural upper-class England, and, past middle age, he encounters a charming adolescent who ends up the love of his life. A worthy artist, also.

Like all that this entails, what is influence, what are the stakes, of youth coming into age, into art, jealousy, manhood, disgust for mushrooms (and even worse, where this, combined with canned breakfast, can lead to!), shock treatment, and what is the use of a horse being with a cat, along other matters.

Or even why love is as rare as guts. I felt my saliva freeze in my neck and tears at the back of my eye-bulbs, when Don Bachardy raised to the camera the first drawing of Isherwood's dead head.

Or why love is as frequent as ideology. If one bothers about the same sex marriage issue, thumbs up or down, mildly or not, that is if such a story can trigger a political, ideological statement or pronouncement, then one should bother also for re-balancing the debt towards people shock-treated. Recall how a broken, elderly Ted, Don Bachardy's brother, comes just a couple of minutes after the sly editing of his former, radiant and handsome self. And, even more sobering, how his brother's voice says, in a tone hurt, with all the could-have-beens of a life muffled, and still matter of fact: the shock treatment ruined his life.

But as this, too, begins to smell of ideology, I turn to what, how shall I put it, elevates to a higher degree the linear, ideological, biographical data of the film.

The day Chris Isherwood died, Don Bachardy commenced reading his diaries backwards. He wanted to reach back to their meeting. Now, for me, if there ever was an effective and affective definition of Jean Baudrillard's awkward phrase "Things get their full meaning when played backwards", this is the case!

To make first things last, a true, a truly meaningful act of love!

Like a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, namely her last one, simply and aptly called "Poem". I would like to quote it in extent:

(...) Our visions coincided - "visions" is

too serious a word - our looks, two looks:

art copying from life and life itself,

life and the memory of it so compressed

they've turned into each other. Which is which?

Life and the memory of it cramped,

dim, on a piece of Bristol board,

dim, but how live, how touching in detail

• the little that we get for free,

the little of our earthly trust. Not much. (...)

Thank you.

On the weekend I recommended this film to friends who had told me how much they enjoyed the film "Christopher And His Kind" (starring Matt Smith). A few days later I realised that my friends are (as with Chris and Don) in a 30+ year relationship, with the younger man facing the impending loss of his beloved through cancer.

So the part of the film which I am worried might be too distressing for them is when Don shares his experience of caring for Chris at home at the end of his life - which was of course extremely challenging, but exactly what they both wanted. I feel privileged to have been allowed such a personal view to this vital act of love - which is an integral part of their story, of lives well lived.

The documentary presents a great deal of interesting material about the life Christopher Isherwood shared with Don Bachardy (and we hear Don's honest first hand opinion throughout). While they were very much in love, it wasn't all wine and roses (I think very few relationships are). Chris wrote "A Single Man" at a time when Don had requested a trial separation and he was not at all confident that Don would return.

Don lives on in the house they shared for many decades and is a duly successful artist (a talent Chris had recognised in him and actively encouraged). The DVD edition comes with several cards of Don's work - including portraits of Chris.

"Chris & Don" is a magnificent testament to the reality of true love and to the value of commitment - and is much more effective in this regard than any other film I've seen.

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.

Portrait artist Don Bachardy, still active in his seventies, reflects on his 30-year love affair with British writer Christopher Isherwood, who was 30 years Bachardy's senior. Meeting in early-1950s Southern California, the bright-eyed, star-worshiping young man and the immigrated author-turned-screenwriter seemed to have little in common, yet their attraction and devotion to one another proved all their naysayers wrong. Although intriguing as both a microcosm of homosexuality in the '50s (and the ways in which it was greeted by the heterosexual community) as well as an enduring love story, this exquisite documentary also touches tenderly on age, on talent, on family and friends, and on reflections of the past from a still-sharp and brilliant mind. Bachardy is a colorful character, a sweet and sentimental fellow, and his thoughts are heightened visually by wonderful home movies of his journey with Isherwood, days both blissful and turbulent. Michael York narrates succinctly from the diaries Isherwood kept from 1939-1960, and several celebrities and biographers recount their experiences in knowing or researching the two men. This is as complete and satisfying a documented memoir as you're likely to see. It's also an extraordinarily moving testament to the human condition. ***1/2 from ****

Who cares. That's all I kept thinking while watching this. A love story about some random gay couple in the 40's. And? I found it incredibly boring and found nothing about either one of these two guys particularly interesting.

Being gay in those days I will admit was pretty much the only interesting thing about this story otherwise I see them as nothing more than a pair of nerdy guys who are really not worthy of filming an entire documentary about. Not only that but it's just another old story of a couple with a big age difference. Control, dominance and the like. This story falls short mostly because of the lack luster characters, there's just nothing special or engaging about either of them. I just don't see it

I know nothing, before see this documentary, about this relation. But it was not so surprising remembering the novel A Single Man and its adaptation by Tom Ford.

A provocative love story between two men defined by 30 years age difference. This is the premise and it works very little because, scene by scene, in the embroidery of Don Bachardy memories, grace to wisdome of directors and words of guests, footage and the precise- profound inspired definition of levels of relation and biography of both, , the eccentric, presumed , romance , forbbiden, easy to blame, becomes only a beautiful portrait of friendship, education, decisions, crisis , noble decision in tough moment, affection, relation with its ordinary ingredients and image of a form, not so original, of happiness. And, I admitt, scene by scene, myself I was falling in love for Don Bachardy.

At the end, touching works not as the worst word to define this long term relation, impling education, affection, comradery and define of life together.