Far From Heaven

They could have come straight out of an advertising brochure for the life of suburbanites in the 1950s, and the Whitakers are indeed ‘Mr and Mrs Magnatech’. This is the name of the household appliance company that Frank works for and whose propagated lifestyle Cathy represents with great charm in advertisements and in the neighbourhood. In the autumn of 1957, in Hartford, Connecticut, all is right with the world and everything has its place: the woman at the cooker, the man in the office, the homos in dives and the blacks in the ghetto.

Of course, things were much more complicated back then too, as the melodrama milestones of Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck in Hamburg in 1897, driven into exile in the USA by the Nazis, one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's great role models) in Technicolor and Cinemascope bear heartbreaking witness. This is worth mentioning because in his (Oscar-nominated) original screenplay for FAR FROM HEAVEN, Haynes takes one of Sierck's most famous melodramas and gives it a transgressive twist.

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955) is about a well-off widow in the prime of life whose children's indignation at the social divide makes it impossible for her to love her gardener. In his consistently retro-style film, Haynes turns the screw of social sanction even further by adding a husband to the all-round amiable, perhaps somewhat naive Cathy, who is collapsing under the repression of his homosexuality. He also allows her to enter into a friendship with her black gardener Raymond, which has the potential to become love. In the resulting web of conflict, skin colour proves to be the trump card - who cares about the gay man in the face of such a scandal! - and Marx's concept of the secondary contradiction is turned on its head.

FAR FROM HEAVEN won numerous awards, was nominated for four Oscars, brought Haynes to the attention of mainstream audiences and represents one of the highlights of Julianne Moore's not exactly lacking career.

(Text: Alexandra Seitz)