Distributor: The Criterion Collection
Release Date: December 9, 2014
MSRP: $39.99
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Film: A / Video: A / Audio: B+ / Extras: A-

Safe begins with a sense of retreat, the camera pointed through the windshield of a car as it traverses California suburbs at dusk, moving ever farther away from cities and planned neighborhoods until it pulls up to, then beyond, an iron gate leading to a mansion. With a single shot, director Todd Haynes evokes white flight, rigid social strata, and the willful oblivion of the rich. (Haynes nonetheless undercuts that security with a subsequent shot of similar McMansions under construction nearby, illustrating how swiftly the goalposts of class identification are moved thanks to escalating one-upmanship.)

The house belongs to Carol (Julianne Moore) and Greg White (Xander Berkeley), a couple whose marriage seems just one more perfunctory show in their prefab lives. Carol spends her day tending to the home. Well, kind of: She primarily takes on the role of middle manager in her own private existence, delegating cooking and cleaning to a Hispanic maid and décor to boutiques. In a society where wealth and occupation define one’s life, Carol’s lack of any real drive renders her a shell of a human being, first seen engaging in passionless sex and later exhibiting a full psychosomatic breakdown of health. Her disease lacks consistent symptoms, and eventually its unknown source is suggested to be a reaction against her cloistered, modern environment. Carol is, in the words of a flier that promises treatment, “allergic to the 20th century.”

Carol’s illness, which mystifies medical experts, alienates family and friends and gradually shuts down her body, naturally provides a parallel to the AIDS crisis. (The film is situated by an intertitle in the year 1987, a temporal setting whose only importance is in shifting a sense of social awareness back a decade into an era when AIDS was only just being acknowledged.) Scenes of doctors clinically testing Carol as if she were an animal, scarcely masking their sheer curiosity as they prod her flesh and probe her mind, speak to the dehumanization of the first waves of patients, while Greg’s impotent disgruntlement with her sickness melds thwarted sexual urges with thinly veiled moral judgment for his wife’s inability to maintain. Even the social isolation of the White home and the family’s circle of friends comes to represent the silence of “normal” society’s response to AIDS, the disease obliquely referenced in pause-filled discussions of the death of a friend’s bachelor brother, or an off-screen televised debate between pundits on the subject of a terminal patient’s desire to end her life more quickly.

If it is impossible to view the film outside of the context of AIDS, Safe nonetheless covers a wide range of topics. Carol’s environmental illness suggests on its surface the poison inherent in modern life, a Faustian bargain that has humans willfully sacrifice their health for comfort and convenience. On a deeper level, it illustrates how precarious capitalist existentialism is, based on a relationship with objects that, if removed from one’s life, could take a sense of personal identity with them. When Carol moves into a naturalist commune to detox, the community she meets combines elements of environmentalism, 12-step rehabilitation, and cultish intensity. That each of these traits coexists so comfortably with the others opens up critiques of New Age philosophy that promotes wellness but nonetheless finds ways to blame victims as much as the reactionary society that sent the outcasts looking for a new home in the first place.

Unknowability is a key aspect of Haynes’s work, especially when he tackles famous subjects. In his overview of glam or his splintered portrait of Bob Dylan, the director treats the mystery of celebrity as hostile but also intoxicating. In Safe, however, the insolubility of Carol’s disease, and of Carol’s vacant soul itself, is profoundly troubling. The cult that accepts Carol in the second half turns the movie into a companion film for The Master two decades before the fact, but where the latter unfurls in close-ups trained on the primal longing and power dynamics of men dominating and supplicating to one another, Safe remains in master shot, perpetually shoving Carol into the literal edges of her own story. Haynes and Moore would later collaborate on a more direct update of 1950s “women picture” domestic melodramas with Far from Heaven, but it is Safe, with its horror-movie intimations of domestic environments in fundamental opposition to their occupants and its heroine as subject to compartmentalization and dismissal even by those purporting to help her, that signals the true revitalization of the genre.

A/V

Safe’s thoroughly cinematic conception has always suffered on home video, first cropping its wide framing on VHS, then failing to fully reproduce the nuances of Alex Nepomniaschy’s cinematography. Criterion’s Blu-ray is revelatory in this respect, teasing out for the first time on home video the full range of the color timing, which gives the impression of a leaking neon sign, of the flash of the ‘80s fading back into the suburban pastels of the past as the Me Generation gets old. It’s also easier to track Moore’s physical transformation as her skin sinks and loses even more color as the film progresses. The soundtrack is equally great, with the careful intercutting of ambient noise and the ambient soundtrack adding depth of field to the mono track. The faint droning of airplanes overhead and the roar of appliances add to the film’s deep unease, and their crisp reproduction here only enhances the film’s many strengths.

Extras

A 2001 commentary track with Haynes, Moore, and producer Christine Vachon is occasionally gap-filled but for the most part extremely entertaining, with the trio cackling at the film’s mordant instances of humor, providing numerous behind-the-scenes tidbits, and articulating themes. A new conversation between Haynes and Moore runs nearly 40 minutes but feels half as long thanks to Moore’s extended recollection of how she approached the character. Her talk of figuring out Carol from the script and from Haynes’s camera setups is a brief masterclass for anyone interested in film acting, more useful than the collected episodes of Inside the Actors’ Studio. A separate interview with Vachon describes the process of making the film, as well as Haynes’s context as a queer filmmaker. The most intriguing extra, however, is Haynes’s 1978 short The Suicide, thought lost until discovered recently by its producer. A 20-minute catalogue of a bullied middle-school student, the film is a great deal more frantic than Haynes’s later work but nonetheless demonstrates early manifestations of his sensibilities. Its nervous sexual energy, be it in the bullies’ virginal taunts, the protagonist’s first flirtation (filmed staring down at feet in awkwardness), or even the Oedipal relationship with the mother, illustrates the terror of maturation far more brutally than the intercut scenes of self-mutilation. Finally, the disc comes with a trailer, and a booklet with an essay from Dennis Lim.

Overall

With David Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me, Safe is the domestic melodrama-horror movie of the ‘90s, a film about the fundamental danger of our supposedly secure living spaces. Its subtly terrifying aesthetic is stronger than ever thanks to a shimmering new transfer, and a batch of informative extras does justice to a movie the Village Voice might have been right to crown the best of its decade.