Review: Chris & Don: A Love Story

A real-life romance to put all those rom-com fairy tales to shame, Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's Chris & Don: A Love Story details the unlikely union between British author Christopher Isherwood - chiefly famous for writing The Berlin Stories, which was the basis for Cabaret - and Don Bachardy, a man thirty years his junior. From the outset, age was the monumental difference between the two, as Isherwood had already achieved professional recognition and befriended countless literary and filmic celebrities (including classmate W.H. Auden) when, in 1952, he met 18-year-old Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach. Having first had a fling with the young man's brother, Isherwood quickly fell for the bright-faced, energetic Bachardy, an L.A. suburbanite conditioned by his mother to adore all things Hollywood who saw in the writer a handsome, sophisticated father figure and role model. As friend John Boorman opines, Bachardy was a malleable individual eager to be shaped by Isherwood into a version (if not outright carbon copy) of himself, a dynamic that became so pronounced that the teenager, raised in California, soon began unconsciously speaking with a British accent.

The thought of a middle-aged adult man taking a ripe boy for his lover and then molding him to his liking is, admittedly, the titillating underpinning upon which Chris & Don is based. Yet although it certainly prompted a host of raised eyebrows at the time - even trailblazing same-sex researcher Evelyn Hooker found it inappropriate - Isherwood and Bachardy's relationship is depicted by Mascara and Santi not as a thing of tabloid salaciousness but, instead, of remarkable loyalty and love. Having taken Bachardy as his partner, Isherwood introduced him to high society, the duo embarking on European jaunts and dining with esteemed company (including Tennessee Williams and Igor Stravinsky, to name but two). Theirs was a glamorous life, lived completely out in the open - while acquaintance Anthony Perkins struggled to correct his same-sex predilections, Isherwood and Bachardy resolutely presented themselves as a couple even when such forthrightness led to open backlash, such as at a party where Joseph Cotton openly denigrated Bachardy's manliness once the more respected Isherwood was out of earshot.

Recounted in large part via interviews with the elderly, ebullient Bachardy as well as readings from Isherwood's expansive diaries (by Michael York, whom the writer thought was the finest element of Bob Fosse's big-screen adaptation of Cabaret), Mascara and Santi's film takes a quite exhaustive look at its subjects, its first half viewed from the perspective of Isherwood and its latter half from that of Bachardy, whose maturation under the tutelage of Isherwood eventually resulted in a successful career as a portrait painter. From either vantage point, what comes through is the winding, unpredictable, fickle way in which vital relationships evolve. Through a raft of anecdotes, the directors capture the roles that complementary needs and unforeseen events play in shaping powerful bonds, whether it be Isherwood's diary admission that Bachardy's age helped him satisfy an unfulfilled desire for fatherhood, to Bachardy's declaration that his maiden experimentation with drugs in the company of Paul Bowles - and the nightlong, paranoia-drenched personal crisis that ensued - helped solidify the couple's affection for each other. Meanwhile, animated sequences based on Isherwood and Bachardy's back-and-forth cartoon dialogue, in which a horse and cat functioned as their surrogates, convey the complementary nature of their rapport and the staunch commitment and respect upon which it was founded.

Chris & Don doesn't fully address the merits (and critical reaction to) either Isherwood or Bachardy's work, and though this omission is clearly designed to afford greater concentration on their romance, it nonetheless stands out simply because few other corners of their lives are left unexplored. Still, Mascara and Santi burrow so deeply into the constantly metamorphosing emotions between the two, as well as how their art reflected those feelings, that such stumbles prove minor. As Isherwood was dying of cancer in the early '80s, Bachardy feverishly sketched his partner every day up until (and including) his final moments, an example of devotion that's mirrored in Bachardy's faithfulness to older brother Ken, transformed by mental illness into a shadow of his former self. Even more than unwavering dedication, however, what the film ultimately locates in the saga of Isherwood and Bachardy - two men so harmoniously intertwined that, as old photos and home movies convincingly establish, they began to sound, think, act and view the world in the same way - is the much-coveted, seldom attained fantasy of becoming one with a true love.