2. Safe

 

Carol White, a self-described "milkaholic" and continually dressed in pristine white, is Safe's icon of purity. In an early scene a couch is delivered to her moneyed San Fernando home; instead of the intended teal, the furniture is black, in a pun that metaphorically relays Carol's indescribable contamination.

Every action in Todd Haynes' commentative film distills the thought that Carol's condition is produced by her community and setting, although, I should note, interpretations resorted to Safe are entirely subjective. The film is only implicative. There is evidence to support a number of claims of Safe's contemporary social relevance (including a frequent citation of Carol's ailment's similarity to AIDS), but the film is durably and tacitly ambiguous.

Carol's supporters become skeptics as medical explanation does not accompany her condition. She is the film's target for sympathy, although any citation of Safe's sympathy is remotely unjust without mention of the comedy that supplements most every scene, as the previously cited one carefully denotes. Carol's resolution includes responding to a video infomercial (one that includes caretakers who're just so sympathetic it's absurd); her resurrection requires her to abandon her family (her husband's aerosol deodorant induces vomiting) and join this stilted community of sorrow and alienation-it is pathetic, and, significantly, laughable.

In such a manner Safe is designed to activate judgment in the viewer: justifiably in watching this film one can be at a moral fault. Safe is an exceedingly rare film in that it contains this humanistic capacity to provoke. It is, despite its unwarranted and modest obscurity, one of the most thematically ambitious films of the 90s. (Rumsey Taylor)