"Chris and Don" and "The Savages"
I watched "Chris and Don" at the Quad the Thursday before last, with The Quarterback, but did not have much to say about it beyond the obvious epithets like sweet, heartwarming. The documentary, directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, depicts the three-decade long relationship between Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood and American portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years Isherwood's junior. The film is somewhat more penetrating and interesting about Isherwood's aristocratic background and his years in Berlin, than about Bachardy's ho-hum middle-class origins. It weaves together Bachardy's contemporary reminiscences (in the Santa Monica home he shared with Isherwood), interviews with talking heads, archival footage, and cutesy animation based on the cat-and-horse cartoons the couple drew in their correspondence. After coming out of the Quad, I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the film. For a story billed by Zeitgeist Films as an "against-all-o...