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
• Rating: 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.com Sales Rank: #10,729 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #38 in	Movies & TV > Drama > Gay & Lesbian
  #91 in	Movies & TV > Gay & Lesbian

• 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

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sharing Love, November 22, 2008

By	Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

"Chris and Don: A Love Story"

Sharing Love

Amos Lassen

"Chris and Don: A Love Story" is just that--a beautiful love story that tells of the feelings shared between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and it is as romantic as it is filled with the history of our lives. The two men fell in love long before gay marriage was ever thought about. Their love began one day on a beach in Malibu, California and lasted until Isherwood died in 1986. This is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen and it is the documentary of a great romance.
Christopher Isherwood was a noted author who is primarily famous for his book "Berlin Stories" which was adapted for stage and film as "Cabaret". He was born in England in 1904 and at the age of 25 he moved to Germany to be with his friend, W.H. Auden. He stayed there until the Nazi party made life uncomfortable for gay men and he came to America in 1939 where he found sexy men and eastern religions. But it was not until 1956 when the love between Chris and Don began. In this feature length documentary we see the remarkable lives of the two men and there is a lot of never seen before footage which was shot by the two including interviews with Liza Minelli and Leslie Caron. The two lived their lives together openly and proudly and did not care about controversy and this was at a time when gay relationships were not accepted. Bachardy was simply an artist while Isherwood was a member of the literati and Don often felt as if he was disregarded by his lover's famous friends. He had to realize that he had to function independently and this caused him to question whether to stay in the relationship or not but he realized that his love for his partner was too great to walk away from. The two attempted projects together and in 1981 when Chris was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Bachardy nursed him through the disease and through the last six months of his life. Bachardy decided to paint only Isherwood and this became the two men's project.
Again I must remind you that the two men were lovers at a time when this kind of relationship was not acceptable and the movie could have showed their love as scandalous and unusual but the directors, Guido Santi and Tina Mascara give us the men's love as sophisticated and gentle as well as perfectly natural. The men shared a sentimental love which involved an artistic exchange that comes close to art itself. The film is cinematically innovative and touching and romantic and as a documentary it is emotionally involving and it is absolutely true. It never indulges in the issues of homosexuality and it looks at the love between Chris and Don as natural and unaffected. It is an ordinary story of passion which shows two people sharing both emotionally and artistically and their love is pure. Footage is mixed with current and archival film as well as cartoons and the result is beauty. The film abounds with intimate details and we see Don is still thriving at 74.
A lot is covered in the film including not only sexuality but aging and death, spirituality, literature and art, celebrities and alternative life styles, tragedy, mental health, drug use and so much more but above all is the theme of love--love that is pure and simple. There is a wealth of first hand material and the legacy of the love of the two men is so rich and beautiful that I find myself tearing up as I write this review.
What great timing for this movie--our country is now deciding whether or not it should legalize same sex marriage and this movie further shows proof that such unions should be sanctioned. There is no agenda in the movie except to show us how love transcends all and this love story is so real and so powerful that you cannot help but feel good. It will open your eyes and it will break your heart as it shows a growth of artistic confidence as a young man, Don, with no strong vision is loved and thereby encouraged to find his way. Here is a movie that could have been sordid yet it emerges as a thing of beauty and a testament to love. If you see no other documentary this year, make sure this is the one you do see.

13 of 15 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 (REAL NAME)

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 artists 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 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 cancerous boniness, opens the smell of the author, the smell of the ink-then in the charcoal-now, and the taste of that morning in this morning. 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, age-sensitive 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; in short, 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 timestill, 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

7 of 7 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 (REAL NAME)

"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.