Lack of Climax?

So if Carol were not inorgasmic, her condition would improve?

Not only does this move lack a climax, it lacks a point of view. It's like a documentary, following the woman with an imaginary disease as she attempts to find relief. It's very well done, but it's not a documentary so you expect something more. I've known people who thought they were chemically sensitive and they're just like that. You can't talk then out of it. The guru/leader of the refuge camp is telling them they're making themselves sick, but they don't seem to get it. Instead, the idea veers off into some mushy sentiment of "love yourself." At the end the Julianne Moore character appears to be trapped in a narcissistic bubble, not getting worse, not getting better. The igloo symbolizes her bubble of self-absorbsion. In which case it really is a kind of horror movie, ending in an austere white antiseptic hell of perpetual self-reference. This same material could be used for some wicked comedy, but in this case the irony is so subtle as to be barely detectable.

Ken

I actually went to a screening at Brown University where Todd Haynes did a Q&A session about the film Poison. (It would had to have been between 1991 and 1994, because I graduated from Brown in the latter year.) Since the Q&A session was before he had completed Safe, I think it gives some insight into what inspired him in making the later film.

He graduated with a degree in Art & Semiotics from Brown and the Semiotics department at the time was where all the film courses were offered so he had definitely absorbed a lot of film theory at the time. (The intro film course was called "Cinematic Coding and Narrativity," which a lot of people on campus called "Clapping for Credit.")

Anyhow, during the Q&A, Haynes mentioned that his film courses had led him to be very critical of what he called "heterosexual closure." In plain English, this is where you end the film at exactly the point where the male and female lead characters are about to pair off/get married/have sex etc. etc. As a gay director, I think he liked playing with the idea of denying this form of closure to the audience. You can see how he does it in Safe. James LeGros and Julianne Moore walk toward Moore's antiseptic igloo, but LeGros and Moore do not touch each other in the slightest, IIRC. LeGros and Moore part uneventfully and then Moore recites the affirmation about how she loves herself directly into the camera. I guess the point is that Moore is better served by improving her relationship with herself and satisfying her own personal needs, rather than substituting her husband with somebody else (as might have happened in a more conventional "Hollywood" movie). Far From Heaven similarly denies the audience a sense of "heterosexual closure," because the last scene depicts how the racial prejudices of the community ensured that Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert could never be together.

Another interesting opinion Haynes expressed in the Q&A was that society paid a lot of attention to Gulf War syndrome, because it was a sickness that primarily affected men, while similarly hard-to-diagnose syndromes suffered by women would be dismissed as hypochondria and hysteria. I suppose that this might have been one of the ideas that inspired him to write and direct Safe.

The film meticulously creates a world in which a rich American woman freely decides to live alone in an igloo in the desert, to have her air recycled by monstrous contraptions, spouting creepy new age shibboleths into a mirror, and all the while presents her decisions as imminently rational. If this isn't a helluva of a climax I don't understand the meaning of the word.

Nothing left except Clorox bottles and plastic fly swatters with red dots on them!

I thought the movie was very good, but it really could have used a better ending.

To me, an ambiguous ending is the most appropriate "ending" for this film. It parallels the plot of the film itself, in that Carol continually seeks, but finds no real answers to her plight. I have a feeling that she will only continue to travel along the same path --- more symptoms, no answers, more treatments, different healers and healing methods --- I really don't think that the compound she was residing in at the end of the movie was her last.

There is no God. Free yourself from the oppression of religion.

What do you mean, no climax? Her "I love you" monologue was one of the most powerful climaxes I have seen in a movie recently.