‘Chris & Don: A Love Story’: An intimate study of a May-December relationship

Published 2:36 pm Thursday, July 31, 2008

In many ways, “Chris &Don: A Love Story,” is a very well-done documentary account of the 30-plus-year relationship between writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy. For anybody interested in writers’ lives or gay issues, it’s a solid offering.

In another way, “Chris &Don” points up a danger for documentary filmmakers. Isherwood died in 1986; Bachardy is still very much alive, and he participated at length in the filming. Filmmakers Tina Mascara and Guido Santi obviously grew fond of Bachardy, and he fairly dominates the movie.

This leads to some touching and intimate revelations, including the story of how Bachardy continued sketching Isherwood — a kind of final collaboration — even as Isherwood was dying of pancreatic cancer.

Yet one wants a bit of distance, at times. We learn much more than we need to about Isherwood and Bachardy’s pet names for each other, especially when they are animated with cartoons about an old horse and a young kitten. (This is yet another violation of my rule about including cartoons in documentaries, by the way.)

Isherwood was already a celebrated author when he met Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1953. They were opposites: Isherwood had been born into the English upper crust, although he rebelled against it, and gained fame for his tales of Berlin in the 1930s (which would later become the basis for the musical “Cabaret”).

Isherwood was in his late 40s; Bachardy was a teenager, a kid who collected movie star autographs. In the early years of their relationship, Bachardy recalls the raised eyebrows that noted their 30-year age difference — an especially intimidating thing when introduced to the kind of famous authors, composers and movie stars Isherwood knew.

The film charts the ups and occasional downs of their relationship, and uses an amazing amount of home-movie footage (including some wonderful stuff shot on the set of “The Rose Tattoo,” with Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani and Tennessee Williams).

Isherwood’s autobiographical writings, in which he owns up to the fatherly feelings that inflect his affection for his lover, are read by Michael York (who played the author, or close to him, in “Cabaret”).

This balances Bachardy’s narration of much of the film — and the movie devotes a segment to his British-inflected accent, which the L.A. native picked up by being around Isherwood so much. Director John Boorman says it was as though Isherwood “cloned himself” by tutoring Bachardy so completely.

“Chris &Don” doesn’t have much of an analytical nature to say about this; it’s more of a celebration of a long-lasting, if necessarily discreet, love story. For this movie’s purposes, that’s enough.