Hadn’t a clue about the Ivory project (you really are a fount of wisdom!) - what a shame that it was never made. I have seen Christopher and his kind, but it was a while back and I vaguely remember not having been too impressed with it [the memory isn’t fresh enough to point fingers at what it was that irked me, but there was definitely something (Pathemata continues to be informative)].
Chris & Don had two screenings at a film festival I was volunteering at a good few years ago, so I’m fortunate to have seen it twice (can’t say whether it would’ve made that lasting an impression otherwise). It made me think long and hard about the nature of relationships and the combinations that seem to suprisingly work (as synchronicity would have it, I had just finished a book of Isherwood’s letters and found that ‘meeting’ Bachardy really helped better understanding them). The film itself, I think, managed a sort of balance - it worked hard to show Isherwood and Bachardy as equals, even as the latter had very obviously gone through uncertainties about his identity (“I can’t help it - I’m an unconscious impersonator”) and some feelings of inferiority to do with Isherwood’s perceived superiority (experience, intelligence, status etc). Also - bringing in Bachardy’s paintings (and Isherwood’s own squiggles) to help tell the story was a great move. On the down side, it did have some staged scenes (which tend to rub me up the wrong way where documentaries are concerned), but the slight discomfort was strongly outweighed by the overall emotional impact of the film, I thought. Hope you get a chance to see it.
havingbeenbreathedout
