The Ageless Romance Of 'Chris & Don'

On Valentine's Day in 1953, a Los Angeles teenager named Don Bachardy met the 48-year-old British author Christopher Isherwood on a Malibu beach. On the surface, Bachardy, a movie fan who specialized in having his picture taken with stars giving him an autograph, had little in common with the patrician English writer, already admired in literary circles for such works as "Goodbye to Berlin," which would later make him famous when it was adapted as the musical "Cabaret."

But that meeting on the beach launched a relationship that would last until Isherwood's death from prostate cancer in 1986. And that is the sole and surprisingly engrossing subject of "Chris & Don: A Love Story," Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's sensitive and affecting portrait of Bachardy and Isherwood's remarkable (for being so unremarkable) union.

Economically limning Isherwood's aristocratic upbringing and early career, as well as Bachardy's years being brought up by a star-struck mother in Los Angeles, "Chris & Don" chronicles their relationship with simplicity and discretion. (For one thing, their meeting was not totally serendipitous, in that Isherwood knew Bachardy's older brother.) Never closeted, the couple not only had to endure the homophobia abroad in "liberal" Hollywood (they'd often attend parties and run into married men one of them had once slept with), but also the disapproval of their own circle for the 30-year age gap between them.

Understandably, Bachardy experienced a degree of paralyzing insecurity around Isherwood's famous friends until, with Isherwood's financial help and unyielding emotional support, he came into his own as an accomplished painter. With lots of delectable-looking home movies of the couple's travels in California and Europe, "Chris & Don" offers an intimate portrayal of a passionate, enduring association, as well as a social history of postwar life -- albeit one that happened to include brushes with Montgomery Clift, Igor Stravinsky and Anna Magnani.

Told mostly by way of talking heads (including the incredibly fit Bachardy himself, whose voice resembles Truman Capote's, with a British lilt), and Michael York reading from Isherwood's diaries, "Chris & Don" resorts to fuzzy reenactments in too many scenes. What's more, viewers may not completely trust its rosy version of events: Rather than an investigation, "Chris & Don" is a celebration -- of love, commitment and devotion until the bitter end. (Even beyond the bitter end, to which Bachardy's equal parts moving and unsettling artistic homage to Isherwood in his last hours attests.) Still, gay and straight viewers alike are sure to be inspired by this lyrical testament to a corollary of Tolstoy's famous dictum: Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but every genuinely happy family is a triumph.

Chris & Don: A Love Story (90 minutes, at Landmark's E Street) is not rated. It contains adult themes and references to sexuality.