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Poison (1991)
Viewed in retrospect, debut films can fall into many camps—sandbox versions of bigger movies to come, clear lifts from the filmmaker’s autobiography, hired-hand pictures that smuggle in early signs of auteurism.
Todd Haynes’ Poison is a rare debut feature because it explores and entwines at least a dozen ideas—formal, thematic, topical—that would interest the acclaimed director and hometown hero for the next 35 years. Other than maybe his music movies (see 1987’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story for those seeds), it’s all in here.
Based on the novels of French polymath Jean Genet, Poison unfolds as three intertwining narratives: an ’80s mockumentary about a boy who disappears after his father’s murder, an imprisoned thief being reunited with a former youth detention inmate, and a black-and-white mad science melodrama about an inventor afflicted with a strange virus.
It’s a tightly woven and ambitious amalgam as Haynes explores queer desire, the beauty and revulsion of masculinity, repression and ostracization, media sensationalism, and visual style’s connection to suggested truth, and he still manages to make all three stories culminate in bracing standoffs.
To celebrate Portland’s own champion of the cinematic Queer New Wave, Haynes’ Poison kicks off Pride Month at Clinton Street Theater on June 1.
Also Playing:
5th Avenue: Moral (1983), May 29–31. Academy: A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Perfect Blue (1997), The Hired Hand (1971), May 27–28. Blue Velvet (1986), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Safe (1995), May 29–June 4. Cinema 21: 12 Angry Men (1957), May 30. Cinemagic: Mad Max (1979), May 27. The Road Warrior (1981), May 27 and 28. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), May 28. Cinema Paradiso (1988), May 29 and June 1 and 2. Black Sunday (1960), May 29 and 30. 8½ (1963), May 30 and June 2. Stage Fright (1987), May 30. Lawrence of Arabia (1962), May 30. Once Upon a Time in America (1984), May 31. Death Rides a Horse (1967), June 1. Clinton: Femmes Femmes (1974), May 27. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), May 30. Who’s on Top (2020), June 2. Cult Classics: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), May 31. Hollywood: Terrorvision (1986), May 29. Stop Making Sense (1984), May 30. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987), May 30. RRR (2022), May 31. The Fisher King (1991), May 31. Repo Man (1984), June 1.
