Safe (1995)

Safe is perhaps a tad too ambiguous for its own good. The film focuses on a suburban housewife (Julianne Moore) who feels sick for no reason. Her doctor suggests psychological treatment, but she finds more comfort in the idea that her sickness is caused by environmental factors, such as car fumes and the like. Haynes never answers the question of what is really affecting Moore. One moment you're sure it's psychological, then physical symptoms displayed by the woman are undeniable. It's not that I really wanted the questions answered, but the constant toying with the audience does become a strain, especially as the film runs for two hours and not much happens. There's also the possibility that the story isn't meant to represent reality, but instead it might be allegorical. This makes it all the more difficult to unravel. I know I sound sort of negative in this review, but I did like it. I don't think it works completely, but I found it fascinating. One reason it does work at all is that Haynes' major goal seems to want to put us inside Moore's head. It shows us what it would be like to suffer and not know why, and how comfortable it might be to, say, join a cult, which is basically what she does in the end. Not entirely satisfying, but definitely well worth a look.

Fmovies: Although it's been almost ten years since filmmaker Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven) made Safe, the film's only secured cinematic release in Australia in 2004. As Safe quietly satirises the 80s, the delayed release improves it, adding another layer of perspective to a heroine who lives life in a series of bubbles.

It's 1987, and timid California housewife Carol (a young Julianne Moore) is immersed in upper-middle class minutiae – ensuring her couch is the right colour, sleepwalking through a tepid aerobics class, and submitting to her husband (Greg White from 24). But gradually cracks appear in this pristine life, tiredness, unexplained illness…until she is diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivity. She then moves to Wrenwood, a healing retreat founded by the charismatic Peter (Peter Friedman) – but will this solve her problem? Or is it just another escape? Safe is a very interesting film about a woman so overwhelmed by her environment that she becomes allergic to it. Writer and director Haynes has combined aspects of the disease film (e.g. Love Story) with the psychological thriller – as Carol doesn't know what triggers her symptoms, the audience never knows when she'll have another attack.

While Haymes criticises the New Age belief that illness is psychologically-based, in Carol's case, it's impossible to separate the psychological and physical aspects of her illness. The cinematography shows her dwarfed by her environment and Haymes offers no easy solutions. ***½/***** stars.

This is my very favorite movie, one of the scariest I've ever seen. The alienation and isolation of the suburbs come across beautifully in this film. Car culture and sprawl definitely contribute to the empty feeling one receives from following this story of a rich suburban housewife's allergic reaction to her vapid life. The mood and statement of the film are epitomized by the scene in which Carol is driving alone on the freeway, going into convulsions from "the fumes", all while the scratchy radio produces mundane religious babble. Ironically, she pulls off the road and is "saved" by the confines of a parking garage. How appropriate based upon the pigheaded tendency for urban planners to say, "Boy, this traffic is horrible, what do we do about it? I know! We'll build more parking garages!" The scratchy babble of religious radio in the scene indicates the hypocritical irrelevance of spirituality when it exists as part of a alienated consumer-driven, environmentally-destructive society. Religion, particularly the new-age movement seems to parallel the suburbs in its pretty blandness and emergence as a way for capitalists to try to redeem their souls/family life after destroying society (eg the inner city). New age and suburbia combine when Carol goes to Wrenwood (a place even more sterile and removed from reality than Carol's suburb), a healing retreat for people with environmental illness. Despite a lot of fluffy, positive talk on behalf of an AIDS victim guru, Carol's physical and spiritual condition only decline at Wrenwood--she becomes more and more like Lester, the faceless guy in the white suit (the perfect new age suburbanite) who is afraid of everything and is expected to die based on that fear.

Safe fmovies. This truly is one of the rarest commodities in the cinema pantheon; a film that conveys multiple plot angles, each as disturbing as the next, yet in a most quiet and understated fashion. Watching the WASPish, vacant, and utterly clueless Carole (played by chameleon beyond compare Julianne Moore) slowly morph from armpiece San Fernando wife to a fragile shell of a person, may not be an experience you will enjoy at first, as a close friend of mine said after viewing "There's no damn way I'd pay eight bucks for that!". Just give it a day or two, for never has there been a film (at least not until The Blair Witch came along) that has a way of seeping into your subconscious as this. That same friend, who so soundly poo-pooed it, later confided to me that the final scenes, which show what Carole had become, were haunting him at work and rest. It is an interesting study in the effectiveness of true psychologically jarring film making, where much is left to the audiences imagination - including the root of this strange affliction, the viability of these help groups, and indeed Carole's perception of all that is happening to and around her.

The soundtrack is perfect - simple eery piano over looming synth. The use of the camera is as economical as it is effective - the less shown the more we think, with broad extreme long shots used primarily in the beginning, showing that Carole doesn't seem to belong in her own home. Yet this film's greatest triumph is, for all that she has been through, and the weak diseased person she became, Carole appears to find happiness and respect for herself. Without a second thought that is the most disturbing possibility I could, or would want to, imagine. Safe may very well be a film that does not lend itself to repeated viewing. But that's fine, because it only takes one dose of this quietly sad and ghostly film to haunt you ever

There are some that feel that a thriller has to be a rollercoaster ride with thrills and spills every minute. This film is not that kind of thriller. SAFE is like those chilling dreams where you are being dragged through something somewhat familiar yet otherworldly and just out of reach of total comprehension. Those sort of dreams are annoying, but we all have them anyway. Some people shrug them off, some think they can explain it away by analysis, and some just like to bask in the fact that they are mysterious, heart-palpitating, and fascinating. I'm in the latter category, and such is my love for this film. This film is like a kaleidoscope where the patterns seem fixed and definable, yet are constantly changing.

There's no doubt that Todd Haynes has something to say about the toxicity of our environment, the toxicity of our relationships, the toxicity of our generic society, and even the toxicity of our venues of healing. Doctors and psychiatrists for example, are cold and sterile and seemingly wearing blinders and cotton in their ears when it comes to really seeing or listening to their patients. New Age healers on the other hand are warm and receptive and seemingly interested in seeing you, hearing you and knowing you. But they trod down the same path that religious fundamentalists do. If your faith isn't strong enough; you won't be healed. One recollects New Age ‘healers' like Louise Hay who claimed that AIDS victims had subliminal desires to hurt themselves, but could be cured with a strong dose of self-love. An especially nasty ruse, when one considers how most of society has already blamed the victim. AIDS victims shouldn't blame themselves, but they shouldn't believe that ‘enough' faith will heal them either. So we can feel for Carol White (as generic sounding a name as one could imagine!) who knows her illness to be real, but who feels guilty nonetheless because no one will let her own her illness. They don't even know she exists, really. And she, from the beginning of this film, isn't sure either.

Carol is an enigma to herself. She's like a fish in an aquarium (her house in fact, looks sort of like a dungeon set in a space-age aquarium), only she never really saw her life as such until she reached the pinnacle of success defined by society. At the opening of the film, she's ‘got it all': wealth, security, servants, ‘friends', ‘family' and health (well, for the time being). But what happens when you've reached the pinnacle of success? Just be happy going to dull social functions and decorate your proverbial palace? Carol begins to see her life –her aquarium- from outside. It's dull, blue and facile. A person who has a sense of self could try to survive in ‘the ocean' of life, but Carol isn't such a person. So it's not so unnatural that she might become so vilely inebriated by the blandness and inanity of her life that she can barely talk and ultimately, can barely breathe. One can get literally ill with an overdose of generic, stupefying life. Ever been stuck in a dentist's waiting room listening to the likes of Tony Orlando and Dawn or Linda Ronstadt? We're talking real nausea here! So imagine being a person who lives in a 24/7 world of pastel colours, pop musak, shopping, vacuous conversation with ‘friends', and being married to a man who has less charisma than a houseplant. Depression of that magnitude would leave any person raw. Carol's blues (which we can see literally in

Not for all tastes, but a superb movie, without doubt. The direction is austere and the character is almost too shallow to care about, but the brilliance of the script and the film as a whole is that it doesn't instruct the viewer what to think, but presents plenty of material to think about. The ending is subtly devastating. Also, the movie contains two or three of the most striking, haunting images I've seen in the past half decade in film.

Someone else compared it to "Dead Ringers", and this is apt in many ways, though the subject matter is less perverse. "Safe" shares a similar aesthetic both in the distance the director takes from the narrative and some matters of style.

Recommended for the daring.