Todd Haynes’ Poison  (NC-17/Uncut)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: B     Film: B

 

 

One of the few great directors (or writers for that matter) to come out of the Gay New Wave is Todd Haynes.  His 1990 breakthrough film Poison continues to be one of his most challenging for several reasons.  Where most films trying to avoid receiving an NC-17 have simply come out in theaters or on video “unrated” because NC-17 films have been banned out of existence, this film not only took the rating, but is one of the few films to receive the rating that used the extra space most artistically.

 

Then there are the three storylines that Haynes manages to juggle expertly: Hero, Horror and Homo.  Hero involves a child who has to kill a parent, Horror has a scientist accidentally infected by his own serum that turns him into a victim of the disease and the townspeople, and Homo takes place in an all-male prison that includes its own set of fantasy sequences in the middle of a nature retreat.  All three deal with a subject Haynes is most interested in: the representation of what is Gay on film.

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were the last great filmmakers to address this on a regular basis, until their untimely deaths, but Haynes has more than succeeded in picking up on this with films like Safe and especially The Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven.  With each film, he becomes better known, but this is one of this more experimental works and it is a success that holds up very well over a dozen years later.

 

AIDS is only addressed in the Horror section, shot totally in black and white, and very effectively to boot.  The shooting recalls everything from Universal early sound era, to later 1950s B-films.  Though it is not easy to shoot monochrome and have style to it anymore, this is the kind of success that recalls David Lynch’s Eraserhead and The Elephant Man.  As for the serum that backfires, it is supposed to be a liquid version of the sex drive, but psychology tells us that the pleasure and death drives are inseparable, so you can just imagine what goes wrong.  The Fly franchise, old and new, also will occur to viewers familiar with the two eras of those films.

 

The Hero section deals with a young boy who cannot handle the pain and isolation of the old male figure in his life that he looks up to being nothing but hateful, violent, destructive, and even sexual before the boy would know what that actually means.  He too is violated.  This adds up to a portrait of the kind of isolation that young boys, who possibly grow to be Gay, have to suffer through.

 

The Homo section is the one most closely tied to the work of Jean Genet.  It is set in a men’s prison with the most potential homosexuality since Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978), as these men have to deal with each other eventually on a sexual level, while those who run the prison even involve themselves in sexploitation and prison humiliation of inmates.  This, however, is made out to be erotic, tying with the prep-school-like men who are doing some humiliating (sexual, even when it is not explicitly so) in the middle of some fantasy outdoors.

 

Though they seem unrelated at first, by the end, it does into an important synthesis of the isolation of the Gay male and the ways these males can find their way out of their individual situations.  The title is ultimately profound, from the idea that such men (and women, by association) feel that there is something wrong with them, when it is just who they really are.  An NC-17 was most necessary to show this honestly and these are not the cartoon gays of bad reality TV, but dignified, realistic Gay men rarely seen in any media or as for-real.  It is a minor classic of Gay cinema, and cinema overall.

 

The full frame image has two cinematographers: Barry Ellsworth on the monochrome shots, and Maryse Alberti for the color footage.  This is usually 35mm, but Super 8mm film is also used.  The mix that results is very effective.  Writer/director Haynes has a fine grasp of all of this, as he explains the differences on the commentary track, including between Kodak and Fuji stocks.  Though the definition and fidelity could be a bit better than it is here, this is still what to expect for the most part, not unlike a documentary program that mixes many types of footage.  The narrow-vision look and feel offers a fine parallel to the aforementioned isolationism.

 

The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is not bad, with dialogue audible for the most part.  The Horror section seems especially better off in monophonic sound.  The other such soundtrack is the commentary with Haynes, actor/editor James Lyons and producer Christine Vachon.  As is the case on the DVD for Safe, the commentary is both non-stop and exceptional.  It offers many great points and moments like the best commentary tracks do.  There is also a small awards/filmographies section, production credits, and the original theatrical trailer for the film.

 

Todd Haynes is one of the most important filmmakers today and if you can handle the subject matter, you have to see Poison.  Do not be put off by the expectation of predictable explicitness; the film is much smarter than that.  This is the work of a gifted artist, a cinematic master in the making.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo