Film review: "Chris & Don: A Love Story"

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July 17, 9:52 PM

by Chris Jensen, S.F. Gay Examiner

 

 

"Chris took this young boy and warped him to his mold." — Don Bachardy in "Chris & Don: A Love Story"

In 1953, the Anglo-American novelist Christopher Isherwood, then 48, met a starry-eyed 18-year-old named Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach. The kid was obsessed with Hollywood stars and could've cared less about anyone's literary pedigree. Still, the two began a tentative love affair that, despite some rough patches in the '60s and '70s, sustained them until Isherwood died from prostate cancer in 1986. 

Their unlikely 35-year relationship is the subject of "Chris & Don: A Love Story," a gorgeous, intensely moving documentary opening Friday at the Embarcadero Center Cinema. 

The film's subject matter will rightly make some people uneasy: common sense tells most of us that a middle-aged guy has no business pursuing a teenager for a long-term relationship. But if a certifiably brilliant novelist finds himself tolerably engaged by a handsome (and, as it turns out, very talented) kid, and if the two of them manage to hammer out a deeply felt relationship that lasts decades, then I guess that's one more reason why I have no business dictating what turns other people's cranks.

Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, the directors of "Chris & Don," have unearthed a huge amount of archival footage (much of it from Isherwood's own 8mm camera) to document the relationship from its very first days. (My only real objection here is that the filmmakers, despite the apparent glut of material on their hands, choose to supplement their original footage with distracting re-enactments.) We see the couple's first trip to Europe. We see Bachardy's training as an artist and his eventual triumph as a noted portraitist. Then, as both men grow gray and Isherwood enters his final months, Bachardy paints a portrait of his lover every day, painstakingly documenting Isherwood's slow death from cancer.   

But the film's lasting impression is hardly grim. For me, the notion of a naive teenager being escorted to Europe by a world-famous author produces the same wistfulness, even envy, that I feel every time I watch "Auntie Mame" (and yes, I watch it frequently)—the fantasy of being rescued from a drab, hopelessly straight world either by your eccentric aunt or, in Bachardy's case, by your friendly neighborhood novelist.

Of course, such rescues are no longer quite as necessary as they used to be, because the neophyte Patrick Dennises and Don Bachardys of the world can navigate the geography of gay America with greater ease than ever before. The time of handkerchief codes and secret knocks and illegal assignations has receded almost completely into the past, with the exception of ironic disco parties in the Tenderloin. Trouble is, those codes and rituals played a key role in the fledgling gay movement: they made the younger generation more dependent on the knowledge of the old.

I'm generally thankful for mainstream gay culture. I'm thankful that assimilation is possible, even if I don't particularly want to embrace assimilation for myself. But now that being gay is so relatively easy—now that, say, the obscure rituals of pre-Stonewall New York are no longer necessary for meeting men—it's far too simple to succumb to cultural amnesia, to imagine that the world has always been the exclusive province of the young.

"Chris & Don" is a reminder that the bond between older and younger generations of gay men was once stronger by necessity. is it ridiculous to imagine that we could make it stronger by choice?

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