Movie

[lsanderson]

Chris and Don: A Love Story (2007)

A May-December Love for All Seasons
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 13, 2008

The three-and-a-half-decade relationship of the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American portrait artist Don Bachardy is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gay-marriage succeeding in a forbidding climate.

Defying social conventions of the 1950s and ’60s, the two men navigated Hollywood society as an openly gay couple, withstanding the slings and arrows of homophobes like the actor Joseph Cotton, who during a dinner party at David O. Selznick’s house made loud, derisive remarks about “half-men.”

Navigation was made all the more treacherous by the 30-year age difference between the two, who met on a Santa Monica beach and became lovers when Mr. Bachardy was 18, but looked several years younger. They spent what passed for a honeymoon in Monument Valley, where the director John Ford, who was shooting a western, and his crew assumed they were father and son.

Mr. Bachardy, now 74, recalls a traumatic experience that sealed their bond: a trip to Morocco to visit the author Paul Bowles during which Mr. Bachardy consumed hashish for the first time. He and Isherwood experienced a blind terror during which, afraid to let go, they clung to each other all night in their hotel room.

Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s tender, extremely touching documentary, “Chris & Don: A Love Story,” examines the history of this complicated and passionate relationship, which ended with Mr. Isherwood’s death in 1986. As Mr. Bachardy remembers, the age and class differences — Isherwood, who dropped out of Cambridge, came from an upper-crust English background and Mr. Bachardy’s father worked in the aerospace industry — made for a relationship fraught with power imbalances. More