Have you got your ticket for Far From Heaven yet?
Here are some reviews that will make you wonder if you can afford to miss this modern classic. This is the tale of a suburban husband as he begins to visit gay bars to pick up men, while his wife develops an intimate relationship with their black gardener.
Sandy Powell is the extraordinary and award winning costume designer for Far from Heaven. She says that Todd Haynes was obsessively well-prepared and he broke the script down scene by scene with visual references for everything. The film was inspired by Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film All That Heaven Allows, which starred Jane Wyman as the lady of the house and Rock Hudson as her gardener. They have an affair and her children reject her. Todd updated this, making the gardener black.
Far From Heaven also mirrored All That Heaven Allows in terms of colour intensity with Todd Haynes allocating different Pantone colour charts (colour profiles used in printing) to each scene. This gives the film a unified look. Powell says that “Most people remember one scene in particular, featuring a group of ladies standing outside a house after having lunch, and how their dresses match the fantastic autumnal trees. I’ve always been drawn to the theatrical, to designs that have a heightened reality. It beats being pale and timid”.
BOOK NOWTodd Haynes’s powerful study of racial and sexual bigotry in Fifties America is heartbreaking and uncannily accurate. Philip French, The Guardian
I came to mock and stayed to pray … instantly and correctly hailed as a capo lavoro, a masterpiece. Peter Bradshaw