_Safe_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Carol White (Julianne Moore) is a perfect housewife. Or no, as she corrects herself during a shrink session, she's a "homemaker.'' She wears beige and pink outfits, white heels, and drinks milk. She tends to her yellow roses and her husband's social schedule, and not incidentally, provides him with something approximating safe sex. The opening sequence shows Carol and Greg driving home. The camera takes us along a winding suburban road, a point of view from inside the couple's car, accompanied by dreary, near-spooky music. The car parks in the garage and the seat belt alarm goes off, the beep-beep muted as the camera waits across the street, watching Carol and Greg (Xander Berkeley) emerge from their opposite doors. She sneezes, quietly. "Bless you,'' says Greg. "It's freezing in here,'' says Carol. Cut to the next shot: Greg on top of Carol, moaning routinely as his pumping speeds up. She silently pats his back, gives his neck a slight kiss as he finishes and rolls off. End of scene. Such emptiness haunts every image of _Safe_, Todd Haynes' starkly brilliant examination of a world where no one can be "safe,'' where illusions remain opaque and surfaces are cryptic. It's an achingly familiar world: set in the San Fernando Valley in 1987, the film assumes not so much that you've been there, but that you've seen it in any number of TV shows or films that you know it by a kind of media osmosis. The ostensible subject is Carol's gradual descent into environmental illness, an allergic reaction to "the twentieth century.'' (And this is an officially recognized illness, called Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.) The other subject is your reaction to her attempts to understand what's happening "to'' her, the way that you process her situation, her vulnerability, her resilience. The world Carol lives in is a scary place. Everything about it is pristine and dull: huge rooms with impeccable furniture, interchangeable client dinners, conversations composed of unspeakable questions and answers, for instance, about her best friend's dead brother. Sitting at Linda's designer kitchen table, Carol asks, "Was it...?'' Linda stops her: "No, but everyone thinks... 'Cause he wasn't married.'' Beat. "It's so unreal.'' Right. Repeatedly, language falls short; there's no communication in this unreal world, only affects and poses. In the locker room after an aerobics class, a friend observes Carol jealously: "You do not sweat! I hate you!'' "I know,'' admits Carol, embarassed and indeed quite sweatless, "it's true.'' "No,'' the friend says, "it's great.'' If there were a single tension driving _Safe_, it might be something like this weird non-distinction between what's "true'' and what's "great.'' But the tensions are multiple and in motion. While Carol s disease certainly functions as a metaphor for what might be termed the toxicity of contemporary life, it s also more intricate, less reductive than that. As in Haynes' previous movies, _Poison_ and _Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story_, the pieces only fit together when viewed from some version of an outside; stuck on the inside, the characters flounder, smile, avert their glances. Afloat in her own over-ordered existence, Carol is gradually overcome by a growing sense of dislocation and dread. Unable to articulate her fears but increasingly aware of them, she searches for rationales: her doctor tells her there's nothing wrong, her husband is frustrated by her perpetual headache, her girlfriends in shimmery pastel dresses look at her with a kind of horror. The film's most obvious generic allusion is to the disease-of-the-week movie, where central characters' moral fibers are tested and viewers' tears are jerked. But _Safe_ won't go there, it doesn't solicit tears; instead, it makes your relation to what you're seeing untenable, confusing, irritating, and fascinating. It sets you up, with a relentlessly chilly visual tone, while continually slipping the knot on any expectations. Dominated by a series of numbing, wide-shot architectural compositions that won't let you "identify'' with Carol, the movie only gestures toward sympathy for her. Moore is extraordinary in this difficult role, luminous and eerily blank, fragile and determined: you really want to feel something for her, but Carol is so dopey and bland, she's hard to hang onto. I've seen it twice now, and both times audience responses were fragmented. The first time, viewers were hushed and clearly uncomfortable; several walked out, letting their seats flop back with loud bangs to emphasize their disgust. The second time, there was again some shifting in seats, some bored or weirded-out coughing, but also some pointed laughter; the character vacuum seems less threatening if you laugh, maintain your own distance. What's compelling throughout is the film's insistence on Carol's emotional squeeze. While she's plainly not equipped to deal with the harsh materiality of her illness (she's so used to her color-coordinated, insular life), she's also all too willing to take on an ambiguous responsibility for what's ailing her. "I'm sorry,'' she says again and again, to Greg, to her doctors, to her friends. The film's style approximates this familiar mixed-message (the environment makes her sick, but it's her fault). When, for instance, Carol has a coughing attack on the highway, the camera pulls out even as the soundtrack pulls in, too close. The sound you hear is inside the car, as she shuts her window against the truck exhaust, then you're almost inside her head, as the radio gets louder (a talk show, of course, about the being saved at end of the world, no less). She pulls into a parking garage, tires screeching, the turns unnervingly tight (as if you're in a car chase), and then she stops, gagging and gasping for breath. The camera, meanwhile, refuses to take - or let - you in: it insists on watching from afar, the garage pillars and fluorescent lights at the edges of Carol's fit, which is center-framed, like a performance. By the end, when she takes up residence at a new agey Arizona colony called Wrenwood, the possibility for "answers'' becomes increasingly remote. After seeing advertisements on television (the low-budget kind, with testimonials from women who look like they might someday appear on talk shows), Carol packs up her oxygen tank and a suitcase, and leaves behind her emotionally sterile world for a chance at group hugs. The guru-founder, Peter Dunning, is described by one of his aides as "a chemically sensitive person with AIDS, so his perspective is incredibly vast.'' (Immediately following this introduction, Peter welcomes Carol and another new "guest,'' but forgets the guy's name, suggesting, subtly, that his "perspective'' is somewhat limited after all.) "You made yourself sick,'' he tells his clients, as they get teary or resistant, "Let go of your anger.'' It's no surprise that the majority of these clients are women, though the film doesn't hammer this point. Peter functions as an inspirational and so, suspicious evangelist (he even has a mansion on a hill, while the rest of the colonists live in tiny cabins, some with porcelain walls and igloo shapes, as if to ward off impurities). His mantra-like prescription is that the "immune system'' can be made to "believe'' the world "out there'' is good, or at least dismissable. He lectures his followers on the positive force of "multi-culturalism'' and "sensitivity training in the worklplace.'' And when Carol tries to repeat the feel-good language, she mixes it up, producing a mishmash of the phrases she's heard: "We have to be more aware...'' she stumbles, "like reading labels or going into buildings.'' Her listeners toast and applaud her. She's on her way. But to where? _Safe_ doesn't take her anywhere, except to Carol's own reflection in a mirror. And as she gazes on her image, her blotchy face and blank eyes, the camera serving as her glass, so she's looking at you and you at her, it's hard to know what to think or how to feel. This image captures the stunning beauty of _Safe_, its precision and poetry in the face of all its absurdities and seeming voids. It's not an image you'll soon forget, no matter how you read it. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer studies project at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.