Chris & Don: A Love Story

Review 1 of 1

moyuraxmi writes:

4of 4 Stars

On February 14, 1953, Don Bachardy (18) meets his brother’s lover Christopher Isherwood (48) on a beach in California and, unbeknownst to both parties, are locked in for life - a life that would enlarge into creative soars for a portrait artist yet to know his calling and an established author awaiting his eternal subject. Yet Chris and Don: A Love Story is not simply about the ungovernable urge to create the life of art that only artists can know where often the object is art itself; it is more humbly about two lovers’ bone-deep adamancy to preserve as much of life as one can in a durable yet aesthetic medium. Here, the intended substance is not the piece drawn nor the word written but the protraction of human essence by embalming it in text, in sketch. The documentary, much like its own subjects, is the act of reinforcing memory with creative proofs - the body of evidence, which, in the process of its production, inspires more memories than any paper or celluloid can hold. A sketch of a gnarled Chris, haggard in his cancerous boniness, opens the smell of the author, the smell of the ink-then in the ink-now, and the taste of that morning in this morning. It is a story of an artist drawing an author while the author simultaneously writes his muse into immortality.

Amid this Edenic coalescence breathes the quiet defiance of a ritual-weary, mid-aged Chris Isherwood against societal prescriptions for public, age-aware heteronormativity. What could have been (and was) perceived as Isherwood’s Humbert Humbertish captivity of the sun-sinewed boy-Lolita is now cited as one of the primary prompters in the gay liberation canon. Yet Humbert Humbertish it all was in many ways as brutally young Don, calling himself “an unconscious impersonator,” willingly and star-struckly serves as Chris’ substrate, replicating his accent, his Cheshire mannerism, and sparse diction. Eclipsed by Chris’ deserved superluminosity and commensurate clout, Don confesses, “I wanted people to like me for who I really was but I wasn’t sure myself who I was. The only thing I knew that I was good at was drawing people...” And draw he did, and with it came the urge to break free from the only lover he had known. Chris’ enabling of Don’s art pushes the latter to gauge the cost of unequal sexual experience with a seasoned, three-decade-distant partner. All Chris wants is for Don to come home at the end of the day after his shenanigans. Which he does in the late 60’s. (Sometimes.)

Like Paulie Bleeker for Juno MacGuff, Chris Isherwood is the cheese to Don Bachardy’s macaroni. Don comes back for good and draws Chris, and Chris only in the last few days of his life, chronicling the coming of his death piecemeal in a preemptively elegiac set of sketches. Chris Isherwood bares his all, his full, bleak nakedness in sacred singularity with his scribe. For Don’s furious fingers, each tender stroke is a prayer for bonus time. Chris dies; Don spends the day drawing his corpse lest memory alone betray. There is everything lyrical about these last soul-jolting images of depleted youth, the shameful shriveling of the body, the kind of lovely grotesqueness that only death has. Guido Santi and Tina Mascara cleverly juxtapose them against a lithe yet withered Don’s feverish workouts at the gym, and close the story with the artist in his solitary atelier where all that is left are drawers of pictures and shelves of books in poetic time-still, all the company a man has shored for a night to allay “the foul rag and boneshop of the heart.”

Sabrina Sadique,
Cambridge MA

Jul 20, 2008 08:44:10