Safe (1995)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s, comes down with a debilitating illness with no clear diagnosis.
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Carol is like an innocent alien, a cross between E.T. and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, driven into seclusion by our intolerable atmosphere.
In an odd way, too, Carol is linked to the Lily Tomlin character in, of all movies, the 1981 Joel Schumacher comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman; Tomlin played an ordinary housewife whose exposure to everyday household chemicals made her shrink, and both movies share a certain anger about women who are victimized, marginalized, and finally radicalized by their own consumerist culture.
Director Todd Haynes, who first unsettled audiences seven years ago by using Barbie-like dolls to make Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, tells this horror tale that's what it is slowly, almost dreamily.
The director of "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," a 45-minute work of genius featuring Barbie dolls portraying the torment of America's anorexic pop siren, Haynes has an insider's view of modern distress, emotional sickness and irony.
In his 1988 short, "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," he blew a wickedly ironic blues for the '70s pop star and anorexia victim.
It's a topic that intrigues Haynes, who explored the subtext of anorexia in his first film, 1988's brilliant "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," which he made with Barbie-like dolls.
Haynes has a strange reputation, first made on "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," a film documentary of the life and death of Karen Carpenter, as played by a Barbie doll.
Whereas "Superstar," "Poison" and "Dottie Gets Spanked" lapse into moments of macabre surrealism…
The story is set in 1987, and many presumed it was a commentary on AIDS, though Haynes dismissed that reading — he’d been there, done that in his earlier Poison.
Haynes--the brilliant, young, gay director whose 1990 "Poison" was a critical and art-house hit--is transferring another plague's fear and chaos to a conventional, solidly middle class, protected world.
His next was an odd gay triptych called "Poison," which was a big hit on the festival circuit, possibly for one of its scenes, filched from the works of poet Jean Genet, that pushed the barriers of the watchable.
He irritated me with his feature debut, "Poison," an art-house flower so swollen with metaphorical pollen it could give a department of English professors a bad case of the sniffles.
Haynes' earlier films include a life of Karen Carpenter featuring animated Bardie Dolls and the stylistically splintered Poison.
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In a scene that's every bit as gripping as a "Lethal Weapon" car chase, Moore suffers a relentless coughing fit while driving, after a cloud of automotive exhaust billows through the car window.