Far From Heaven

Cathy is the perfect 50s housewife, living the perfect 50s life: healthy kids, successful husband, social prominence. Then one night she stumbles in on her husband Frank, kissing another man, and her tidy world starts spinning out of control. In her confusion and grief, and being victim to Frank's drunken cruelty, she finds consolation in the friendship of their African-American gardener, Raymond, a cultured widower with a business degree. His appearance at a local art show scandalises the local bigots and this socially taboo relationship leads to the further disintegration of life as she knew it. It is a performance to which Dennis Haysbert brings a Poitier-esque dignity and poise. 

Written and directed by Todd Haynes and nominated for four Oscars, Far From Heaven is an extraordinary homage to the 'women's picture', playfully yet reverently alluding to the 1950s as a movie genre - the rich and digitally enhanced autumn leaves, Elmer Bernstein's score imitating the lush foliage with its extravagantly emotional strings. Haynes is able to make explicit an issue which could not be tackled by the Sirk melodramas at the time, and is still partly implicit in a modern and distinctively gay critical sensibility which treasures them now - homosexuality. In these doomed relationships Haynes has given us stories about human decency and courage beyond any postmodern irony, a vivid human story and compelling love letter to cinema itself.

Too Much: Melodrama on Film is a UK-wide celebration of exaggerated staging, score and performance to create the ultimate spectacle. Melodrama tells intimate and familial stories, a rare cinematic form that concerns itself with women's inner lives repeatedly dismissed by critics that found the outpouring of emotion "too much" and yet these films and the legacy of 'women's pictures' carry searing social commentary beneath a glossy veneer. Imperfectly feminist yet endlessly relatable, come to the cinema to reconsider what, if anything, is "too much".

Supported by BFI FAN and National Lottery funding and co-curated by Young Electrics.

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