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Chris & Don. A Love Story

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"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.

... 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.

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

This documentary recounts the long, intimate relationship between author Christopher Isherwood (Berlin Stories ... which became I Am a Camera ... which became Cabaret) and the portrait artist Don Bachardy. Isherwood has been dead for over 20 years, so the documentary consists primarily of an extended one-sided interview with Bachardy (we hear his thoughts but not his interrogator's questions) as he knocks about an enviable Southern California beach house full of tasteful mementos of his life with Isherwood, reads Isherwood's diaries (voice-over provided by Michael York), and sketches a smattering of nude youths. Bachardy's speaking voice is strangely accented and somewhat affected, and is full of "ums" and "uhs." While Bachardy has charm and the details of his story are interesting, I found myself getting increasingly relieved whenever the film shifted to archival footage.

While the film will possibly appeal to a broad-minded general audience, it will be of special interest, I think, to gay men (and possibly lesbian) viewers. For one thing, the film shows the way homosexuals in days past had to define their relationships for themselves. Before gay marriage (with its implied monogamy) became a cause celebre, men like Chris and Don needed to consciously craft their own understanding of what they expected of one another. Don speaks frankly about both being taken to Hollywood parties openly as Isherwood's partner/date (and enduring homophobic comments from Joseph Cotton) and about his interest in seeing men outside their relationship. Yet somehow their relationship with one another was primary and mutually fulfilling. It is also interesting from the perspective of the thirty year difference in their ages (Don was barely legal when they started their relationship). As in classical man/boy relationships, there was an element of mentor and protege. Isherwood wisely encouraged Don to pursue drawing and painting, rather than writing, and their relationship does not seem to have suffered from competitiveness. It was gratifying to see that Don had a sense of himself, one Isherwood encouraged, and that Don was no mere boy toy or trophy wife. Thirdly, this film is likely to interest gay men because of the sense it gives of how much has and hasn't changed for gays since the early 1950s.

The filmmakers have done a good job of augmenting Don's story with archival footage and interview clips from people like Leslie Caron and James White. They also seemed to have a realistic sense of their subjects' standing on the world stage (they acknowledge that Isherwood was a good though not a major 20th century writer). During the course of this film we get to see a number of portraits Bachardy did of Isherwood, including some of the many he drew during Isherwood's final days. The filmmakers show but do not assess the quality of Don's work. The earlier portraits seem to have been mostly charcoal sketches or black and white watercolors (many of which were stunning); these were followed by minimalist, gestural drawings employing thick brush strokes (impactful when they hit the mark); and his current paintings are in the bright colors of the Fauves (which struck me as erratic and infantile). If he's an artist in decline, he doesn't seem to notice or mind. In the end, it is his life that's his greatest creation and it is an honor to hear him tell his story without complaint or apology.

If anyone ever listened to his own drummer-- even though he was born in Great Britain and far away from the likes of Thoreau who made the phrase famous-- Christopher Isherwood certainly lived life by his own rules. Born of an upper class British family in 1904, he went against his mother's wishes that he become a don by deliberately flunking out of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He then went to Berlin in 1930 where sexual freedom was in abundance before the rise of Hitler. Isherwood came to the U. S. in 1939, settled in Santa Monica and became lovers with Don Bachardy, 30 years his junior, whom he met with the latter was perhaps 16-- according to Barchardy's remembrance in this documentary-- and the two settled into a very public relationship that lasted 30 years until Isherwood's death in 1986. "Chris and Don: A Love Story" is a brilliant documentary of that relationship. Much of the hour and a half long film is told by Bachardy who is now in his 70's. There is also archival footage of Isherwood, commentary by Liza Minelli-- who looks like a million dollars-- and Leslie Caron with voice over by Michael York.

The first thing you notice is that Bachardy speaks exactly like Isherwood. It is obvious that Isherwood in many ways molded the younger man in his own image. This unorthodox relationship seems to have worked on every level as Isherwood became a fatgher figure, mentor and lover to the younger Bachardy, sending him to art school where he was able to become an artist in his own right rather than just Isherwood's young lover. Bachardy talks about the time in 1963-64, that he describes as rocky, when he considered leaving Isherwood. He had argued tdhat since Isherwood had had sexual freedom and the opportunity to meet other people and have other lovers before he met Bachardy, that he should have the same privilege. In a particularly sweet gesture, Isherwood had decided that the two lovers should not have an animal since some of the affection that they might have for each other would be given to the animal, so the two men because horse (Isherwood) and cat (Bachardy). When Barchardy went out cruising, Isherwood always wanted to know, upon the younger man's return if he had caught a mouse. During this difficult period of their relationship, Isherwood wrote what I believe is his best novel, A SINGLE MAN. It covers one day in the life of a college professor whose lover has just died. It was Isherwood's way of imagining what his life would be like should Barchardy leave him.

Bachardy also talks about life after Isherwood, recounting in a particularly moving sequence how he sketched his lover during his final illness and even afer he had died, and discusses his life as an artist as well. (By the way, everyone should live in a house as beautiful as their cottage in Santa Monica.) The DVD has a lot of extras: too much commentary by the actress Gloria Stuart, Bachardy on same sex marriage, Bachardy on his art collection, home movies of Christopher and Don in Mexico, on the set of "War and Peace" (1955) and "The Rose Tattoo" (1956) with footage of Tennessee Williams being casual as well.

This is one of the best documentaries I have seen in a very long time.

Chris and Don is one of the best documentary films I've seen in years. It is informative, moving and very honest in presenting a beautiful and very long lasting love relationship between two men. What lifts this film above others is the actual footage of the great artistic contribution these two men have left us both in their photography and in their art work. *****highest recommendation

Mark Spanjian
mspanjian@yahoo.com

Through the story of Chris and Don, we witness the evolution of a gay consciousness from the innuendos of 1930's Berlin to the out of the closet and proud way of life. Don't be misled by the earlier reviews, its quite obvious in the film that the two never engaged in anything until Don was of the current age of consent (remember, homosexuality itself was illegal, so the issue of consent was out of the question). I think this is the perfect response to anyone who would say gays don't love each other, these two did.

After 3 views and showing it to friends I had to finally buy it, now I can show it any time.
It is a great documentary about love in this case great gay love. Having met Don Bacardi in person you can still see the twinkle in his eye that he had a very special loving relationship.

I've been a huge fan of the works of Isherwood my whole life it seems, and this was such a rewarding experience. One of the best documantaries I've ever seen.
It was so interesting to see the archival footage of Christopher and Don and the interviews of friends and biographers. a real journey beautifully told and poignant. If you love the lives of writers this DVD is a must.
Gursel Ali
Melbourne, Aostralia

The documentary of author Christopher Isherwood's decades-long relationship with his much younger partner, Don Bachardy. Both idyllic and heart-breaking, I gave it 5 stars--here's the L.A. Times review [...]