It’s among the most daunting challenges in movies, a medium saturated with romance but often adverse to romantic complication: to convey with empathy and insight the nature and functionality of different kinds of love, especially those easily dismissed or judged. That romance between men is but the least provocative kind of love considered in Chris and Don: A Love Story is a tribute to how bravely and sensitively this documentary assumes this challenge. Its lovers shared a 35-year relationship that prodded conventional wisdom about class, monogamy, age difference, and, perhaps most interestingly, the compatibility of lovers of whose interaction incorporates parent-child or master-protégé dynamics. Directed by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, who make elegant use of the couple's abundance of home movies, Chris and Don is a tender and thoughtful portrait of intimacy and communion finding its own pattern in a world fraught with obstacles.
Those obstacles would not however include obscurity or poverty. The titular Chris is Christopher Isherwood, the blue-blood Brit of the global literary set and author of Berlin Stories, the basis for the stage and screen phenomena known as Cabaret. Isherwood met Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1953. He was 48, Don 18, though he looked even younger. Their relationship grew steadily but was frowned upon by even close friends. Don must have seemed so unformed, often attending parties with the likes of Auden, Stravinsky and Tennessee Williams, where his presence would register as little more than a fetching accessory, so impressionable that despite his So-Cal roots he adopted a mid-Atlantic accent and many of Isherwood’s gestures, not to mention haircut. But he stuck around. And thanks in part to Isherwood’s support and mentorship Bachardy became a renown portrait artist. (Samples of his work are featured not only in the film but in the booklet in Zeitgeist’s new DVD.)
When Isherwood died in 1986 Bachardy explains how he immediately, almost unconsciously, began to read Isherwood’s diaries, patiently working his way backwards through this extraordinary life, knowing that somewhere in the middle he would find his own first appearance. Like so many things in Chris and Don, this factoid can initially seem creepy, yet slowly becomes something very moving in its manifestation of trust and a sort of sublime exchange of ideas, body and soul. Bachardy’s our guide on this journey through the past, and his recollections and manner feel honest, calm and forthcoming. He’s also an interesting subject for a film in that film itself was so formative an influence in his youth—his mother took him to see Joan Crawford films when he was four. A pivotal moment in his maturity came when he was on the set of The Rose Tattoo and heard Anna Magnani’s fart. The fart helped him to pentrate the veneer of vacuous movie glamour and, we can assume from the development of his work, take interest on the richness of human life that lurked below. It’s but one of the irreverent, surprisingly sweet anecdotes that make Chris and Don a lively, smart, and emotionally intense experience.
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