Film | SAFE (1995)

DCP | 1995 | Directed by Todd Haynes | USA | 119 minutes | English

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A mysterious illness alienates Carol White (Julianne Moore) from her suburban enclave in the San Fernando Valley. Is the culprit industrial pollution or perhaps her own psyche? After medical professionals offer no clarity about her worsening symptoms, she seeks solace and protection through alternative means. SAFE exemplifies an ambivalence found throughout Todd Haynes’ filmography, especially in his most recent feature, MAY DECEMBER (2023), which also stars Julianne Moore. In a 1996 issue of BFI’s Sight and Sound, Haynes clarifies that the film alludes to the AIDS epidemic, but themes of ecological disaster and the allure of New Age healing will strike viewers today as prescient. SAFE sidesteps heavy-handed messages, instead prompting us to consider how illness and industrial pollution are bound up with identity and belonging, within and beyond the suburbs of California.

Cinema of Contamination stages contact, confrontations, and entanglements with enigmatic toxins and landscapes. Spanning suburban California, the Andean mountain range, a forbidden zone, and a poisonous forest, the series examines how to make meaning within ecological collapse and in the aftermath of dictatorship and war.