Product Details

• Actors: Leslie Caron, Christopher Isherwood, Michael York, Don Bachardy, Liza Minnelli
• Directors: Guido Santi, Tina Mascara
• Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Zeitgeist Films
• DVD Release Date: February 24, 2009
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001KZOUXW
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,797 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Chris & Don. A Love Story" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Chris & Don is a documentary that takes the viewer on a nostalgic journey through artist Don Bachardy’s past, as he recounts his 35-year romance with author Christopher Isherwood. Ample interview footage starring Bachardy, now in his 70s, recalls his trials with Isherwood’s older, more famous friends, and his struggle to discover his own identity through portrait painting. Descriptions of how the couple endured ridicule to maintain not only a homosexual relationship but also a bond despite their 30-year age difference during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s in Hollywood, is what makes this documentary more than a wistful romp through the past. Directors Guido Santi and Tina Mascara (Mandala) tastefully edited in vintage footage of the couple on beaches and on film sets in what will seem to most like a charmed lifestyle. For those seeking straight biography about Isherwood’s career, however, Chris & Don is not the film. Though there are book excerpts read by Michael York (who starred in Cabaret based on Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories”) to reflect Isherwood’s feelings about the relationship, the focus of this film is on Bachardy and his memories of his father figure. It is uncanny how Isherwood’s influence on his lover becomes apparent, as Bachardy has the same British accent and mannerisms as Isherwood. Conversely, Chris & Don does not feel preachy in the activist sense. It merely portrays, like Bachardy’s colorful paintings, sincere visions of an author and man, who nurtured Bachardy in what was obviously an extraordinary relationship. --Trinie Dalton

Product Description

Chris & Don: A Love Story is the true-life story of the passionate three-decade relationship between British writer Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin Stories was the basis for the beloved Cabaret) and American portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior. From Isherwood's Kit-Kat-Club years in Weimar-era Germany to the couple's first meeting on the sun-kissed beaches of 1950s Malibu, their against-all-odds saga is brought to dazzling life through beautiful, rare home movies and reminiscences from Don and many of their friends, including Leslie Caron and Liza Minnelli. With Isherwood's exemplary status as an out-and-proud gay hero, and Bachardy's eventual artistic triumph away from the considerable shadow of his life partner, Chris & Don: A Love Story is above all a joyful celebration of a most extraordinary couple.


SPECIAL FEATURES:
- 16:9 anamorphic transfer, formatted for widescreen televisions
- More of Chris and Don's home movies, including footage from the sets of The Rose Tattoo (1955) and King Vidor's War and Peace (1956)
- Deleted sequences with Don Bachardy, including an interview on gay marriage
- Deleted interviews with actress Gloria Stuart (Titanic), filmmaker John Boorman (Point Blank), and actress Leslie Caron (Gigi)
- "Don on Chris": An 8-page printed monograph of Bachardy's paintings of Isherwood
- U.S. theatrical trailer
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired
- Stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Essential Gay History, February 28, 2009

By 

I. Sondel "I. Sondel - lover of the arts" (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chris & Don. A Love Story (DVD)

"Chris & Don: A Love Story" (Zeitgeist Films) is a portrait of the 34 year relationship of British writer Christopher Isherwood and portrait artist Don Bachardy (30 years Isherwood's junior). This film, one of the best of 2008 (and one that would surely have been mentioned on my "ten best" list had it only played in a theatre in Tallahassee), is an important and inspiring document of a courageous, openly gay love story, perhaps the most blatant and visible of the last century after Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Directors Guido Santi and Tina Mascara have culled an impressive amount of archival footage of these singular artists, including scenes with W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Igor Stravinsky, and mixed them with interviews and comments from Leslie Caron, James White, Gloria Stuart and John Boorman. The wisest move made by these filmmakers, one which elevates and imbues this work with genuine legitimacy, was to focus their camera on Bachardy and to have excerpts from Isherwood's diaries read by actor Michael York.
They met on a California beach in 1952 when Bachardy was 16. Isherwood was the celebrated author of The Berlin Stories (not yet famous as the source of "Cabaret", or the author of "A Single Man" and "Christopher and His Kind"). Their relationship didn't coalesce for a few years, but once it did, the two became inseparable. Bachardy is brutally candid about the relationship, how they were viewed by friends and family; but more importantly, how they interacted with one another, the stresses and strains of coming from different countries, classes and generations.
Bachardy, forever youthful in appearance, details a brief period when he insisted the relationship be "open" to provide him an opportunity to sew his wild oats. Still, with a thirty year age gap, Isherwood often seems a benign cross between Humbert Humbert and Svengali.
"Chris & Don" is a treasure for those well acquainted with the work of both men. However, for those unfamiliar, this 90 minute film will both illuminate and entertain.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Relationship, a Love, Explored...., February 28, 2009

By 

James Hiller (Beaverton, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chris & Don. A Love Story (DVD)

... so perfectly, so eloquently, in this marvelous documentary: Chris & Don: A Love Story.

In 1952, Don Barchardy meets author and Hollywood celebrity Christopher Isherwood on a beach in Santa Monica, and a relationship is born. What's remarkable, among many remarkable things in this story, is that Chris was 30 years older than Don, who was just coming out of his adolescence. They lived together, for over 30 years, unreservedly and openly as a couple, amidst the rampant homophobia and discrimination that existed, even in "liberal" California.

The life wanders through the current life of Don as his reminiscences about his great love, the life of Chris before meeting Don (with particular emphasis on Chris' time in Berlin, which eventually spawned "Cabaret") and their life together. The filmmakers framed the story beautifully with animals; that being, Chris and Don referred to themselves in the context of animal personas, Chris being an old horse, Don an affectionate cat, and they sprinkle delightful animation throughout the movie. The effect is charming, and adds a poignant punctuation mark at the end.

Perhaps the most moving part of the entire story occurs at the end, as Don recounts Chris' last days, and his endless drawing of his love. The pictures haunt, the sadness looms. It's then you get the sense of the realness of their relationship, how real all relationships are (despite conservative groups' attempts to thwart them), and the depth of what they meant to each other.

Don's honesty drives this movie. He holds nothing back as he recounts his life, as well as the life of Chris. You have to admire someone for opening his heart so much to a camera crew; I doubt many of us would be willing to have such clarity. In a way, it really brings us closer to Chris, as I am sure was Don's intent in making this documentary.

I cannot recommend this movie enough. Watching it in the theater with a rapt audience was powerful, watching at home, privately, is even more powerful.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chris and Don: A Love Story -- Nay, not Humbert Humbert at all, January 18, 2009

By 

Sabrina Sadique (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chris & Don. A Love Story (DVD)

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, is 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 an artist can know where often the object is art itself; it is more humbly about two lovers' bonedeep adamancy to preserve as much of life as one can in a durable yet aesthetic medium. Here, the intended substance is neither 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 cancerous boniness, opens the smell of the author, the smell of the ink-then in the charcoal-now, and the taste of that morning on this morning that you as audience has just been made privy to. It is a story of an artist drawing an author while the author writes his muse into immortality pari passu.

Amid this Edenic coalescence breathes the quiet defiance of a ritual-weary, mid-aged Chris Isherwood against societal prescriptions for public, ageist 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 superluminous stature 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; in short, to go out and plumb the sea. 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 embarrassed shriveling of the body, the kind of lovely grotesqueness that only death can boast. 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 arrest, all the company a man has shored for a night to allay "the foul rag and boneshop of the heart."

Sabrina Sadique
Reviewed on July 20, 2008