Safe (1995)

Waste of time

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Beautifully written, directed and acted movie about a rich Los Angeles housewife going insane and blaming it on environmental toxins (sort of like the nuts nowadays who think their Teflon pans and plastic wrap are trying to kill them). Having found no doctor who can help her, Carol takes refuge in a creepy new-age cult in the desert - but instead of getting better she gets much worse.The story itself is pretty lame, but the extremely subtle and intelligent dialog, the absolutely perfect direction, editing and photography, and Julianne Moore's tight, brutal performance make it fascinating. I can understand why it won some obscure award as the best movie made during the 1990s, but it doesn't seem dated at all. I could easily believe it was released last year, and the fact that Moore has hardly aged at all in 20 years would back me up.

An affluent and unexceptional homemaker (Julianne Moore) in the suburbs develops multiple chemical sensitivity.Although much of the film is not noteworthy for its cinematography beyond the coloring (lots of green), there is one scene that features the most terrifying process of getting a perm... almost as terrifying as Haynes' obsession with AIDS."Safe" was voted the best film of the 1990s in the 1999 Village Voice Film Poll, though it does not seem to have gained the same reputation from general audiences. IMDb rates it a bit low, as does Rotten Tomatoes, and the awards overlooked the film. Jessica Harper appears as Joyce, and that makes the film worth seeing whether or not it has awards.At times the film seems like a subtle attack on Scientology, not unlike "The Master"... and yet, the film also seems sincere. Maybe there is something to be said about making life simple, avoiding chemicals, and other things... maybe.

How to exemplify that Reagan's sun when he promised morning again in America was really a toxic sun, toxic for the soul, this is all the foreground you're going to need here. The film opens in '87, three years after that promise, in a sunny suburb somewhere in south California, and it's reasonable to assume this couple, with their spacious home, their well-kept garden, their ample free time, is one of many who were soothed by that promise, the promise to have a Dream, into a kind of comfortable sleep.Todd Haynes has the benefit of building upon Lynch, which is to say the option of discarding in hindsight the sexual darkness of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, the film opens to that effect with the woman having bland, passionless sex. This is how far sleep has numbed the senses, even desire is deadened and the nightmare has diffused into the very air itself, the smoggy air of Los Angeles.This is given to us as the woman developing some sort of allergic response to her surroundings, but the point is that we cannot know where evil is flowing from into the world, we just can't. Is it car fumes, the hair-dresser's chemicals, something off the new teal sofa they have ordered? Or is the mind conjuring the illness as the desperate means of making known the extent of the damage inside? Is it stifled instincts, stifled for too long? The point remains though, that life keeps breaking down on us and for no apparent reason, this satisfied life that should have been alright.Observant viewers will be able to link her response with the barely audible static on the soundtrack that continuously hums beneath dull day-to-day life. It is the mind humming to some malevolent tune of the fabricated world.This is taken to be resolved in a remote New-Age commune, out in the clear air somewhere in the countryside. Now we've been accustomed, ever since the Beatles traipsed all the way to India to be scammed by spiritual gurus, to view this sort of therapy as fundamentally crooked, but the leader gives some solid advice; quiet mind, beauty cultivated inside, clarity, all that Japanese gardening for the soul. At the same time, he advocates an almost paranoid retreat from the world, is complacent and satisfied, and we're shown his luxurious house that overlooks the otherwise spartan retreat. No, something is wrong here as well, and the filmmaker is smart enough to barely hint at merely another kind of toxic environment that sells peace of mind.Now so far the film's power is rhythm and pulse from the heart of this woman as she tries to cope with it herself; slow, dissipating, tiredness, plus ambiguous response to unsatisfactory reality. The husband is bland and selfish but is not a caricature, which would have significantly cheapened the thing. Nothing has been really subtle but evokes its own time and space.You have to wait till the end for the formative mechanism that gives rise to this clouded mind, the masterful touch is all Julianne's and carried alone before a mirror.Of course each patient has given his own reasons for his illness, but this one we have followed close. She finally encounters her own mirror image in that artificial womb of a room, and does she look at a real self looking to see a real image, warts and all, or does she soothe herself with another dream, another promise for morning again? This is the thing that got the ball rolling, ever since Reagan's ad one morning on TV; it would all be alright, you just had to trust someone else.Julianne Moore completely erases any presence of herself in the process, truly outstanding work.

Todd Haynes's Safe is married to its era's increased awareness of plastic toxicity: where the world had once embraced plastics as miraculous new wondersubstance, its environmental implications were at last coming to the forefront. There is tension, however, in the toxicity of plastic's chemical origins and the sterility promised in its final form: overwhelmed by the omnipresence of invisible chemical fumes, protagonist Carol White finds refuge in a plastic oxygen mask. The irony of her reliance on plastics mirrors her relationship to larger systems of oppression in the film: in escaping her claustrophobically prescriptive suburban life, she finds even greater claustrophobia and restriction on her anti-chemical reservation; she must strain herself to find the new environment any sort of improvement. The film offers a clever commentary on our relationship to the social systems above us, and comes recommended in spite of its occasional intentional dullness. –TK 11/11/10