[Safe]
‘Did you wrap that yourself?’ ‘God, I wish I were that creative.’ For a film so icy on its surface, [Safe] has its fair share of laughs. Where an audience places them, however, would depend on where that audience was itself placed. In Europe, presupposing a more ingrained cynicism to all things New Age, there have been more guffaws than there would be in, say, Southern California, where it’s set. [Safe] is a film about so-called ‘environmental illness’ that mutates its impact according to its environment.
The neutrally designated Carol White (Julianne Moore) is a busy homemaker in the affluent San Fernando Valley of 1987; her days a bustling whirl of dry cleaners, baby showers and interior decoration. One day she is overcome on the freeway by the fumes of a passing truck. Over the weeks her health begins to deteriorate, through lethargy and headaches into vomiting, nosebleeds and collapse. Her doctors are at a loss. Her oafish husband Greg (Xander Berkley) is largely unsympathetic; Rory, his ten-year-old from another marriage, is indifferent. Eventually Carol White is reduced to carrying an oxygen cylinder, in and out of hospital, cocooning herself away from the world as she is told she is suffering from EI - an allergic reaction to the modern world. In her darkest hour, though, she finds Wrenwood, a New Mexico retreat for the ‘chemically sensitive’ where she hopes to find the will to recover.
For a film with so little in the way of dramatics, [Safe] has an extraordinary pull over the viewer. Haynes’ screenplay appropriates a common language (the disease of the week movie) but turns it on its head, allowing for it to be read straight - Carol as victim - or skewed violently to the side; Carol as perpetrator of her own affliction. Is her supposed illness really any worse than the asphyxiating meaninglessness of her world of Hispanic maids, robotic aerobics and anaemic sex? And still Carol is sure it’s all just that innocuous modern catch-all, ‘stress’.
Even if we accept the first half as scrupulous in its depiction, the time spent at the suffocating Wrenwood asks question after question about the complicity of the sufferer in their own malady. Haynes is adroit in his use of stereotype here: being a broadly liberal film-maker (Left, gay) we take his only black character and Wrenwood’s head, Peter (Peter Friedman) - both chemically sensitive and HIV+ (ie, Haynes wants we should read him as gay, without corroboration) - as sympathetic. That the whole compound is suffused in Christian and New Age rhetoric throws us dangerously off-guard. When Peter proclaims with evangelical zeal that he has stopped absorbing the negative vibe of news by simply not listening any more, the film takes a leap in the dark.
[Safe] is very deliberately shot. Alex Nepomniaschy’s cinematography is dark and claustrophobic even though Haynes elects to shoot most of this in long, wide takes, isolating protagonists inside a frame defined by the edges of the image. It is both real and horrifyingly surreal at the same time. No matter how big the Whites’ house (and it is), it feels every bit as small as the porcelain-lined igloo in which Carol ends up. [Safe] is an astonishingly still film, as though events were being filmed underwater. Stylistically the director is making us work towards a self-diagnosis, scrutinising the furniture, traffic, the incidental detail for a rationale. Haynes confesses to being heavily influenced by Kubrick’s 2001, as if there could be any doubt given the expansive airlessness of David Bomba’s exceptional set designs. Ed Tomney’s stifling ambio-synthetic score perfectly mirrors what we see.
Moore is exceptional. Like the rest of the film, she is miraculously still within these huge frames, unnoticed, almost apologetic as she goes about her mundane business, suddenly choking, coughing up blood. She is constantly looking for safety, be it in her vacuous SoCal lifestyle or the noxiously reassuring platitudes of Wrenwood. Her world gradually contracts from the cavernous expanses of the city to the igloo, but from the pulsating red-white title card to the sickly, ill-focused credit crawl, never once do we as an audience feel safe.
[Safe] has as many detractors as evangelists (that doyenne of dreck Barry Norman called it one of the most boring films ever made, no less) and certainly it has an aesthetic all of its very own. As much as it has a TV reality about it, it is also a remarkable piece of science fiction cinema: ‘It should feel like an airport where you never touch real ground’ says Haynes. His very different last feature, the eye-catching but sloppy Poison, gave little hint of his capabilities; [Safe] has the kind of radical political agenda and artistic gravity seldom seen in American cinema. It’s demanding, deeply unsettling and about as safe as a hand grenade.