http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article7015418.ece
Don Bachardy, the Single Man novelist's partner, explains why the
designer's new film deserves its Oscar nomination
February 5, 2010
Eric Gutierrez
Colin Firth's Academy Award nomination for Best Actor this week will
certainly have given a boost to the UK release of A Single Man on
February 12. Yet, surprisingly, the biggest controversy over Tom
Ford's sensitive portrayal of George, a gay man mourning the loss of
his lover, has come from gay commentators and literary scholars in
the US. They accuse his adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964
novel of distorting a book often cited as the first masterpiece in
modern gay literature and a transformational salvo in the depiction
of gay men and their relationships.
Most reviewers in America, where the film has already opened, praised
Firth's great, career-defining performance and echoed Peter Travers
in Rolling Stone: "Ford is a true visionary, but it's his humanity
that gives the love story a ravishing, bruised grandeur." Still, gay
bloggers and Isherwood partisans accuse Ford, the fashion
designer-turned-auteur, of taking his film along the scenic route
instead of in the direction that Isherwood intended, ending up at an
entirely different destination from that of the novel. In particular,
the controversial decision to make George suicidal with grief after
the loss of his longtime love (played in flashback by Matthew Goode),
is contentious in gay communities.
The first disquiet came when Ford, who has lived with a man for 20
years, repeatedly told the press that A Single Man was not a gay
movie, presumably to boost its box-office appeal. Then a cover story
in the gay and lesbian news magazine The Advocate quoted him seeming
to discount the importance of gay identity, before claiming that
Isherwood himself made "no issue" of sexuality in his work. Gay
activists, scholars and readers took to the barricades, or at least
to the internet.
As Oscar night approaches A Single Man is being discussed not as an
impressive debut but as a debate on gay politics and the pitfalls of
adapting seminal works. Not since Steven Spielberg directed the slave
epic Amistad in 1997 has a director's identity politics been such a
part of a film's buzz.
Into this melee steps the renowned artist Don Bachardy, Isherwood's
surviving partner, who has become a vigorous defender of Ford and his
film. "My advice to Tom Ford was the same advice Chris [Isherwood]
gave to young screenwriters adapting books," says Bachardy, who has a
cameo in A Single Man and a credit as creative consultant.
"He always advised them to make it their own, to not try to reproduce
the book in movie form. He had my backing to make it his own and
that's what he did. I'm just so glad I liked the movie. I was
dreading seeing the film because I liked Tom Ford so much I knew I
couldn't lie to him. What a relief that screening was, to be able to
tell him with real enthusiasm how good it is."
In his studio overlooking the Pacific ocean, Bachardy, 75, elegant,
with a shock of silver hair, sits surrounded by his colourful
portraits of the famous (Isherwood), the powerful (Jerry Brown, the
former California Governor) and the beautiful (several young men of
genetic good fortune). With a charmingly inexplicable European
accent, the artist from Los Angeles provides an insight into
Isherwood's own thinking about adapting novels to film, depictions of
gay relationships and the mysteries at the heart of A Single Man.
He has lived for 50 years in the hillside home he shared with the
British-born writer before Isherwood's death in 1986 from prostate
cancer at the age of 81. The two met when Isherwood was 48, a
sophisticated and celebrated figure, and Bachardy was 18 (some claim
he was 16).
The couple became a fixture among the glamorous expatriate and
celebrity set in Los Angeles and over the years their relationship
has become culturally significant. The 2007 documentary Chris & Don:
A Love Story secured their place without sanitising or sanctifying
the ribald and flawed nature of either love or men. The film touches
on the period when Bachardy, eager to be his own man and an artist,
began "to wonder if my domestic relationship with Chris might be an obstacle".
In 1962, when he was 28, he briefly considered ending the
relationship. "I also got involved with somebody that made me think
it could be something serious," he admits. Thinking of life without
Bachardy ultimately inspired Isherwood to write A Single Man.
"The period before he started writing on the book was the bumpiest in
our relationship, when it seemed more possible than ever before or
after that we really might split up," Bachardy explains. "Chris was
very concerned and began imagining what he might do, how he would
cope with his life. So he kills off my character in an automobile
accident ... All I really had to do with the book was rock the boat
in our relationship."
By the time Isherwood was writing it, the couple had overcome their
differences. "I realised Chris wasn't an obstacle, he was someone I
really did not want to do without," Bachardy says. "I would rather
adjust my career as an artist to my life with him rather than give
him up for my life as an artist. As it turned out, I could have both,
and so could he."
After Isherwood's death, Bachardy inherited the copyright to all the
author's work and over the years rejected several overtures to make A
Single Man into a film. It wasn't until he received an "intelligent"
script from the screenwriter David Scearce that he contacted CAA, the
agency that handles the Isherwood properties. Auspiciously, CAA also
represents Tom Ford. He had spent years turning down more experienced
film-makers, so some observers wondered why Bachardy chose someone
with no previously discernible interest or talent in film-making to
bring Isherwood's classic to the screen.
"Two years ago we met to discuss the [film] and I liked him right
away," Bachardy explains. "He had such energy and enthusiasm and
determination, I said to myself, if anybody can get this project
done, it's Tom Ford. As it turns out, he knew the book well, was very
excited about making a movie out of it, and liked Scearce's script,
so all the important elements seemed in place. I gave him my blessing
right away."
The film is structured as a day in the life of a potential suicide,
which creates an undeniable dramatic tension. But the novel's
partisans argue that it belies George as Isherwood wrote him, a gay
man who loves being alive, despite his loneliness and isolation. In a
passage in which George visits a dying friend, tellingly absent from
the film, Isherwood writes: "How good to be in a body even this old
beat-up carcass that still has warm blood and live semen and rich
marrow and wholesome flesh!"
When it was published in 1964, the novel's sympathetic portrayal of a
middle-aged gay man free from self-hatred and moralistic shame was
shocking. And liberating. Ford himself has said that he responded
positively to Isherwood's angst-free gay characters when he was a
young man questioning his own sexuality.
In the pre-Stonewall age of the closet, A Single Man was
revolutionary among depictions of homosexuals, who invariably ended
up dead (film versions of Tea and Sympathy and The Children's Hour),
or outcast (Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar).
Sexual politics and literary criticism may be as dry and stale as
day-old popcorn but in an age when the cultural and constitutional
validity of gay relationships is now on trial in California, and gays
are targeted for death by clergy and politicians in parts of the
developing world, Ford's period mood piece is a timely and
provocative touchstone.
"Like Forster before him, Isherwood's impulse was to write about a
well-adjusted gay character," says James J. Berg, dean of social
sciences and art at College of the Desert in California, and editor
of three books on Isherwood. "I think he would have reacted strongly
against the suicide aspect of the film."
Evelyn Hooker, the pioneering psychologist whose research led to the
American Psychiatric Association removing homosexuality from its list
of mental disorders in 1973, was a friend of Isherwood's. Her 1957
research paper, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual, proved
that gay men were no more or no less happy than their heterosexual
counterparts. Isherwood, in fact, introduced his friend to many of
her gay subjects. "He helped her in her research because he believed
in her thesis," Berg says.
Bachardy agrees, maintaining that his longtime love was Exhibit A of
the thenrevolutionary concept that gay and happy could indeed be
synonymous, even later in life. "I keep coming back to Chris as an
example. He taught me that fun in life didn't have to end because one
is middle-aged."
In A Single Man, George's commitment to life and search for meaning
echoes Isherwood's own. Along with the novel's indictment of
homophobia, this is a key to its reputation as a seminal gay classic.
"In removing or ignoring these elements," wrote Claude Summers,
editor of glbt.com (the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender search
engine), Ford "fails to understand the historical significance of the
novel he has filmed".
Bachardy acknowledges that: "There are all kinds of examples of
movies that disappointed people who love the book. They want to have
an experience seeing the movie similar if not identical to the
experience they had reading it. And that's impossible to achieve."
That a film is not a book is embarrassingly obvious but not entirely
convincing to the purists, who quickly point to Isherwood's dislike
of Bob Fosse's Oscar-winning Cabaret, a musical adaptation of his
Berlin Stories. The film is widely considered a classic yet the
writer famously quipped: "I don't recognise my own child."
Liza Minnelli was simply too talented for Isherwood's taste, turning
his creation Sally Bowles from deluded and desperate into superstar diva.
Bachardy pauses to consider Isherwood's negative reaction to Fosse's
creative adaptation in the light of questions about A Single Man.
"The question of is it true to Isherwood, because the gun isn't in
the book . . ." he wonders aloud. "Chris wrote movies and I bet he
would have found it very difficult to adapt his own book because it's
so interior and ideally suited to its literary form. I think the gun
really makes it much easier for the audience to understand what's
going on. A gun is visual. You can't see inside George's head. You
can see a gun."
A Single Man is released on Feb 12
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