Chris & Don. A Love Story ****

Don was still a teenager when he first met Chris, who was thirty years his senior, on the "queer beach" at Santa Monica in the early 'fifties. "Chris & Don. A Love Story" is an intimate and frank documentary of the 30-year relationship between writer Christopher Isherwood and the much younger Don Bachardy, told largely with interviews with Don and narration by Michael York over clips from home movies (often with Hollywood personalities and writers like Tennessee Williams), photographs, and excerpts from Isherwood's diaries.

The movie gives us a revealing look at Isherwood's development as a writer in the preceding years, growing up in a well to do English family, intentionally flunking out of Cambridge, and landing in Berlin in the 'thirties at the urging of poet W.H Auden. Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" from the period put him on the map, and later was the basis for the incarnations of "Cabaret." With war coming, Isherwood moved to the U.S., and settled in Hollywood working as a screen writer.

Chris' access to Hollywood stars dazzled the star-struck Don, and Chris was able to arrange for some of the biggest stars to sit for the Don, who, with Chris' encouragement and art lessons, became a portrait painter. Chris was the main influence on Don, and molded his speech, his sense of fashion, and outlook on life. As Don says, "It was just what the boy wanted, and the boy flourished." The scope and range of the documentary is arresting, and Don, now 74, and still a working artist, leaves out nothing as he relates their story, up until the day Isherwood died in 1986 at the age of 81.

Some animation and dramatic re-enactments enliven what is so often a dull form. I particularly liked the animated sequences of the horse and the pussycat (Chris and Don's pet names for each other) that give a sense of their relationship, and which allowed them to say things to each other that might have been too difficult to say directly.

Writer/producer/editor Tina Mascara and Guido Santi have done a superb job putting this project together. Their understanding of the currents of social class, sexual orientation, popular culture, friendship, and love make an arresting work. It is definitely worth seeing.

Not rated. 90 minutes. Tina Mascara - Director / Producer / Editor, Guido Santi - Director / Producer / Editor, Julia Alexander - Producer, James White - Producer, Ralph Q. Smith - Cinematographer, Miriam Cutler - Composer, Francisco Stohr - Production Designer.  Distributed in the U.S. by Zeitgeist Films.

Principal cast, as themselves: Don Bachardy, John Boorman, Leslie Caron, Christopher Isherwood (archival footage), Liza Minnelli, Gloria Stuart, and Michael York (narrator).