Savage Grace

 

Dir: Tom Kalin
Spain/USA/France  2007 97mins

Award winning Kalin’s 1992 feature, Swoon, was based on the lives of killers-lovers Leopold and Loeb. His second feature, starring Julianne Moore in the lead, is also based on a true story about the heirs to the Bakelite fortune. Living the empty life of the idle rich, effervescent, tempestuous social butterfly Barbara is a stark contrast to her quiet, constrained husband Brooks Baekeland, the uncomfortable heir. Their only son, Tony, is brought up in the firing line of their relationship, smothered by his mother’s neediness and rejected by his father’s increasing emotional distance. As Tony matures he enters into a three-way relationship with drug dealer Jake and Spanish gold-digger Bianca. When Bianca goes off with his father, Barbara’s suicidal reaction requires Tony’s undivided attention and his relationship with his mother takes a particularly bizarre turn. Careening from New York in 1946 to London in 1972, via Paris and Spain, this true story with a stellar cast charts one family’s descent from decadence into a dysfunction that would make Jerry Spring proud.

Cape Town

 

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