Cinema
Safe
Todd Haynes · 1995
Synopsis
San Fernando Valley, 1987. Carol White, a well-off housewife who lives with her husband and stepson, divides her days between aerobics, her friends and the decoration of her house. She starts coughing behind a truck, gets a nosebleed during a perm, and chokes at her dry cleaner's while pesticide is being sprayed. The tests find nothing and her doctor sends her to a psychiatrist. A leaflet seen at the gym leads her to a meeting on environmental illness; later, she discovers a desert community that takes in such patients.
Context
The director's second feature, shot for a million dollars and shown at the Sundance festival in January 1995. It was read as an allegory of the AIDS epidemic, which the film never names, and its author had been active in an association fighting the disease; the film does not explain its character's illness any further. Julianne Moore plays the lead and will work with Haynes again in several of his films; he judged the subject even more topical twenty years later.
Who it is for
A two-hour film, with wide shots in which the character looks small in empty rooms, and which explains nothing to the viewer.
Prizes and reception
Voted best film of the nineties in a poll of Village Voice critics, it had earned about five hundred thousand dollars in the United States.
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