Poison **** (1991, dir Todd Haynes) – Classic Movie Review 1528

Writer-director Todd Haynes’s remarkable 1991 movie is one of the three cornerstones of the early 90s aggressive New Queer Cinema movement, along with Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992).

Previously best known for The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), his film on the life of singer Karen Carpenter re-enacted by Barbie dolls, Haynes boldly delivers a drama that tells three separate, intercut stories about outsiders, sex and violence.

In Hero, Richie, a young boy of only seven, kills his father in a shooting and flies away. In Homo, love blossoms between inmates in jail as a prisoner in Fontenal prison is drawn to an inmate he knew years before at Baton juvenile institute, whose humiliations he witnessed. And in the black and white Horror, a scientist unlocks a mystery virus, the elixir of human sexuality, drinks it and becomes a festering, contagious murderer who ravages America.

Hero takes the form of a documentary in lurid colours that asks what kind of boy Richie was and what provoked the shooting. Haynes’s pays the clearest homage to the French writer Jean Genet in Homo, invoking the situation and spirit of Genet’s ‘Un Chant D’Amour’ (1950), but with the story now set in contemporary America. The comic nature of Horror helps to make its striking message about the horror of the AIDS virus more accessible.

Haynes’s prize-winning film may be complex and confusing, but it is also a wildly inventive and enjoyable movie. It won the Best Feature Film award at the Berlin International Film Festival 1991 and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 1991. Haynes must have been specially please to win the Special Prize of the Jury for ‘keeping the subversive values inherent to any genuine poetry in force’ at the Sitges – Catalonian International Film Festival 1991.

http://derekwinnert.com/swoon-1992-daniel-schlachet-craig-chester-classic-movie-review-1526/

http://derekwinnert.com/the-living-end-1992-mike-dytri-craig-gilmore-classic-movie-review-1527/

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1528

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com/