Imitation of Life (1959)
Directed by Douglas Sirk
In 1940s New York, a white widow who dreams of being on Broadway has a chance encounter with a black single mother, who becomes her maid.
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What critics compared Imitation of Life to
Hanson even manages to slide in one arty reference to the great film director of the 1950s Douglas Sirk, by having Rabbit's mom glued to the TV watching "Imitation of Life."
Today it’s almost impossible to look at Sirk’s films without turning to Brecht, whose innovative theories on distancing and alienation are all over films like Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons , Sirk’s Imitation of Life and Lars von Trier’s upcoming Dogville , a film inspired in part by a song from Kurt Weill and Brecht’s famous Threepenny Opera , which Sirk had staged in Bremen in 1929.
Cast as Michael’s errant, drug-addicted mother, Lenox takes her role, which amounts to only a few lines of dialogue, and fills it out with such delicate, shamed emotion that it’s hard not to resent the director for insistently cutting back to Our Star, the ever-bland Bullock, who listens in such an oblivious, absent way to Lenox’s heartfelt attempts to communicate that I was reminded of Lana Turner inanely marveling at the fact that her long-time maid Annie (Juanita Moore) has friends in Imitation of Life (1959).
I’m sure that the excursion-to-a-Coney-Island-day-at-the-beach scenes in the 1941 comedy “The Devil And Miss Jones” or the 1959 “Imitation of Life,” as Hollywoodized as they were, presented more realistic versions of such excursions than this movie does—I mean, Coney Island is/was a lot of things, but lyrical is not one of them.
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Además de imitar el estilo visual de Douglas Sirk (espacios opulentos, vestuarios suntuosos y una paleta de colores saturados) como en All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) o Imitation of Life (1959), Haynes pretendía recurrir a gesticulaciones y ademanes de mayor estilización para expresar la desilusión y desesperanza de sus personajes sumidos en un mundo que visualmente luce brillante y perfecto.
Audiences who would have felt embarrassed about spilling tears at such (much better) testaments to the love of a mother like "Stella Dallas" or "Imitation of Life" could weep at this while feeling they were watching a picture "relevant" to their lives.