Far from heaven, but close to fall (2002)

Let’s get real. Fall. It is not always sunny and gold. More often along with colorful leaves, it brings the promise of early winter and icy November evenings. This is the time of a year when you skip on your friends with some lame excuses and get cozy under the warm blanket. What to see? For Christmas films, it is still too early, and the ones set in summer would only cause unnecessary annoyance. There are a few titles that effectively can fight the autumn blues, one of them is “Far from Heaven”.

Like many American productions, this is a remake of black-and-white film ”All that Heaven Allows”” from 1955. It tells the story of Cathy, a role model for women in the fifties, full-time wife, and mother who serves her freshly baked apple pie with a forced yet spotless smile. In return, her successful husband gives her a kiss on the cheek like you give to your little daughter. This is a portrait of a woman who, like her black servant, sweeps under the rug all the disappointments and humiliations. A woman, who seems to have everything while being on top of a small-town society. However, her marital problems carefully masked during the evening dinners and cocktail parties, will soon come to light when Cathy catches her husband Frank cheating on her with another man. Lonely, she seeks for understanding, which she finds on her own property. Between her and her black gardener establishes a bond of understanding, a need for acceptance and attention.

Production in subtle but firm way paints the colorful background of the story, but it is not a reference to beautifully presented colors of the fall here. The mid-fifties is a time of awakening of capitalist America, the belief in the American Dream, racial segregation, Rosa Parks’ arrest and the rigid social conventions. In such realities the struggles of the main characters must remain within the four walls, the public is still too stupid to distinguish homosexuality from the disease or racism from tolerance, although they have just defeated Nazism, they see themselves as a master race in relation to blacks.

In its classic melodrama framework, without excessive pathos though, the film tries to focus on two threads that properly developed, could provide the plot for two different movies. However, the director Todd Haynes consistently leads both by what hundred-minute session leaves us with a slight saturation deficit. Hollywood still hasn’t used the theme of unfulfilled husband, a man with a whole range of emotions and weaknesses. Unfortunately, it prefers to replicate the template and present the silhouette of a powerful ”Eisenhower” guy, who has numerous affairs in the city, while his naive wife in a suburban home is waiting at the set table.

The film deals with quite an interesting topic, and in spite of his genre, it presents the emotions in a very frugal way, not declining the strength of the viewers’ reaction, nonetheless. Sometimes a whisper or just one look is louder than screaming and or sea of tears and this film proves it. It chokes emotions in its own throat, as its characters are forced to do, too.