Fiction

MILDRED PIERCE (EPISODE 4 + 5)

Todd Haynes
USA 2011
148 min
V'11

Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There explicated the Bob Dylan story using six different “Dylans” of various races, ages, and genders. His Mildred Pierce addresses another sort of star text, exhuming a Depression-set popular novel by tough-guy naturalist James M. Cain.
Anyone familiar with the Crawford Mildred Pierce might assume Haynes’s remake would resemble the faux–Douglas Sirk of his reimagined 50’s weepie Far From Heaven. But the attitude is quite different – there’s neither camp nor irony nor reference to the Crawford vehicle. Unfolding over five and a half hours, the rise and fall of a hardworking, hardheaded, not particularly imaginative young mother who divorces her deadbeat husband and parlays a knack for baking into a chain of 85-cent chicken-plate eateries – only to let her hard-won empire crumble away – is epic domestic drama with intimations of historical tragedy. Too distant and hardscrabble to evoke nostalgia, Haynes’s Mildred might have appeared in the disillusioned days of The Godfather or Chinatown. The black-and-white past of the 30’s is reconstructed in pastel hues, with morally dubious characters bathed in an ambiguous golden light. (Jim Hoberman)

The Viennale also shows the film classic Mildred Pierce (1945), as well as Parts 1 & 2 and Part 3 of the series

Credits
  • Todd Haynes
  • Jon Raymond nach dem Roman von James M. Cain
  • Ed Lachman
  • Affonso Gonçalves
  • Camilla Toniolo
  • Carter Burwell
  • Mark Friedberg
  • Ann Roth
HBO (Home Box Office), John Wells Productions, Killer Films, MGM

HBO (Home Box Office)

Turner Broadcasting System Deutschland
HD
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