Kritiken

The narrative of the martyr mother reaches its apotheosis in another Douglas Sirk classic, Imitation of Life, a film that I had the pleasure of being moved—and at times, shocked—by for the very first time.

In Imitation of Life (1959), though the most piercing of all Sirk’s mirror shots is of a despairing Sarah Jane and Annie in their indelible last meeting in a dressing room, Sirk stages, composes, and edits most of the scene for direct emotional effect.

Sirk closed the 1950s — and his feature-filmmaking career — with Imitation of Life (1959), his most commercially successful movie. Its themes of mother-daughter love and abandonment, shame, and racial injustice provoked in many viewers at the time an endless flow of tears and can still bring on the waterworks today. I can't recommend this or any of Sirk's melodramas highly enough, whether for first-time or repeat viewers.

Early in IMITATION OF LIFE, Lana Turner's character says, "Maybe I should see things as they really are and not the way I want them to be." Oh, the irony. In Douglas Sirk's films, however, it doesn't so much burn as blaze--so fiercely, in fact, that it's not difficult to understand how the irony and subversiveness for which Sirk is known among the cinephile crowd was lost on popular audiences at the time.

For his last Hollywood film, Douglas Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism... For Sirk, the grand finale is a funeral for the prevailing order, a trumpet blast against social façades and walls of silence. The price of success, in his view, may be the death of the soul, but its wages afford retirement, withdrawal, and contemplation—and, upon completing the film, that's what Sirk did.

Sirk's magisterial final feature is a melodrama of visual opulence and spiritual agony, lacerating social critique and a plot sudsy enough for the Sunday wash.

It's a masterpiece, one that belongs on any list of the great films of the 1950s. A master class in how to make a movie about misguided, surface-focused people trapped by a hypocritical society, without condescending to or withholding compassion from them.

The great thing about watching Sirk's most-acclaimed melodramas is that, even when it seems like they're about to drown in their own 50s gloss, you know a nasty sarcastic sting is just around the corner somewhere... Imitation doesn't seem to be quite as well-regarded as All That Heaven Allows (not as overtly pugilistic in its set-up) or Written On The Wind (less ostentatiously lurid), but its brutal moments are as righteously nasty as anything he ever did.

His 1959 film is a scathing indictment of middle-class complacency that holds the characters responsible for the way they avoid, rather than confront, racial prejudice, economic pressure and familial responsibility. Eccentric and unconventional, [both versions of Imitation of Life] are proof of the possibility of experimentation even within the hegemony of Hollywood's studio system.

A true woman's picture and a masterpiece of female empowerment/female entrapment, the film, working from Fannie Hurst's novel, is a lush Ross Hunter-produced Technicolor dream. But through dealing with single motherhood, racism, class-ism and what it means to better yourself and your children it also showcases some pretty intriguing human behaviors.

The film opens with a shot of diamonds slowly falling into a glass container and filling the frame from top to bottom. Sirk immediately and deliberately acknowledges the precious and artificial nature of the film and, much greater, the film's metaphoric, almost pathological obsession with surfaces (from mirrors to the color of the characters' skins).

Douglas Sirk's 1959 film was the biggest grosser in Universal's history until the release of Airport, yet it's also one of the most intellectually demanding films ever made in Hollywood. The secret of Sirk's double appeal is a broadly melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly criticized and challenged by the film's mise-en-scene, which adds levels of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection.