I gatecrashed a campus screening today of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven (2002/USA), a film whose synopsis and description alone has hitherto given me the willies, though given my recent interest in Haynes, I thought I'd delve. I liked it on one level, disliked it on another. As a throwback to Douglas Sirk's melodramas (All That Heaven Allows features prominently) it's meticulously designed and visually gorgeous - the establishing exteriors were especially impressive, and I liked the allegorical mise-en-scene of bright, autumn oranges fading gradually into bleak, depressingly wintry whites. The music, too, is effectively sweeping and preachy, and the editing, full of abrupt dissolves, makes exposition and narrative development suitably jerky.

The story, however, is another matter. I realise the dialogue is necessarily stilted and the acting quite one-dimensional and hammy, but only some of it works, and in being a contemporary "adaptation" of Sirk's "woman's films", it's quite cringe-worthy.

The Academy fell for it, probably interpreting it as an issue film (or moral lesson) for the contemporary world, but I see it more as an exposé of the gender codings within Hollywood melodrama itself. A genre film exploring its own history, not so much the racism and suppressed homosexuality of 1950s society as the representation of race and gender in the cinema itself of that time. Inevitably, it becomes a critique of the plasticity of family life and the varnished surface of populist cinema (like Haynes's own Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), a biopic that replaced actors with Barbie dolls).

Still, though, as much as I find that sort of post-modernism impressive and clever, it ultimately left me dead and cold - and for such an emotionally charged script, that's surely a major and lingering flaw.

Of interest, then, only in relation to those films it evokes - which it does effortlessly and brilliantly.