Far from Heaven

FAR FROM HEAVEN is not only a clear homage to Douglas Sirk's oeuvre and his Technicolor palette, but also an impressive symbiosis of great visual elegance and a desire for confrontation in the form of a stylishly staged melodrama. The relationship of a model American couple at the end of the 1950s is shaken when the husband (Dennis Quaid) gives in to his homosexual tendencies and the wife (Julianne Moore) enters into an affair with a black man. The repressive iron grip of social conventions stands in stark disproportion to the emotional longings of the protagonists. (mg)