Narcissism that leads to murder

His movies make you feel uneasy, with his treatment of sex and violence, but then that's exactly what Tom Kalin wants to do, writes Donald Clarke.

IN 1992, TOM KALIN directed an unsettling film about one of America's most notorious murders. Swoon, a hit at festivals and art- houses throughout the world, pondered the 1924 slaying of young Bobby Franks by the sly students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

Sixteen years later, Kalin, a sharply-dressed man in highbrow glasses, has finally delivered his second feature and it too concerns itself with one of America's most notorious murders.

Savage Grace, a film so creepy you feel the need to shower with carbolic after the credits roll, walks us through the icky life and grim death of Barbara Daly Baekeland. In 1972, Baekeland's son murdered the prominent socialite, wife of the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, in her London home. It seems the two had been having an incestuous relationship.

So over the last decade-and-a-half, Tom, now 46, has directed just two films and they have both concerned society homicides. And he seems like such a nice fellow.

"Well, when other people are looking at my career they always think it significant that my father worked in social reform," he says. "He was warden of the St Charles School for Boys, which was a reformatory school for delinquents. He was involved with finding ways to get young criminals back to work. Eventually, he ended up working at the same institution where Leopold and Loeb were incarcerated.

"Even as a teenager I visited prisons and thought that this is what all children did. So, in a strange way, I do think of myself as carrying on my father's work."

There is certainly nothing creepy about Kalin himself. Crisply dressed in a white shirt, his bald head polished to a gloss finish, he comes across like a hugely friendly, uncharacteristically well turned-out professor of Big Complicated Semiotics (or something).

He has, indeed, spent a significant amount of the last decade in academia. In between producing films such as I Shot Andy Warhol and Go Fish, Tom found time to teach film-making at Columbia University school of arts and I would guess that many of the textbooks he used featured his own name in the index.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Kalin, along with fellow directors such as Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant and Gregg Araki, were said to have invented something called "New Queer Cinema".

As is often the case with supposed artistic movements, the leading lights were wary of being grouped together in such a simplistic fashion. It is, nonetheless, hard to deny that the turn of the 1990s did witness a boom in cinema with a gay sensibility.

Films such as Haynes's Poison and Kalin's Swoon - informed by Aids, though not about the disease - have proved hugely influential on today's independent film-makers.

"I suppose there was a generational shift," he acknowledges. "We were all influenced by Derek Jarman . We did have some other things in common. It is interesting that very few of the films that ended up being called New Queer Cinema were directly about Aids - Todd's Poison maybe - but being in your 20s and having contemporaries die around you does unite you. I still think the work is wildly varied though."

But something was happening, surely? Gay directors were gaining visibility.

"I think so. Movements are always invented by academics and journalists, not by film-makers, but a great many directors were deciding that you didn't have to make films about gay characters who were living in the suburbs with a dog and a station wagon. You could take more risks. The effect was such that it is now quite hard to tell what a gay film is. Is Brokeback Mountain a gay film? In that movie a straight film-maker felt able to use attitudes to gayness as a barrier to romance, just as he might have used attitudes to class previously. That's a very satisfying development."

Kalin acknowledges that he was not a movie brat. "I didn't spend my teenage years dreaming about a film career," he says.

After studying literature at the University of Illinois, he embarked on a career in the still embryonic world of video art. When he moved to New York in the 1980s, he bumped into Christine Vachon, now legendary as Todd Haynes's tireless producer, and she helped steer him towards creating the strange, spooky entity that was Swoon. The cold, monochrome film, which focused more closely on the sexual tension between the murderous intellectuals than had previous adaptations of the story, received excellent reviews wherever it played. So, where on earth has Tom been all this time?

"I was foolish enough to want to produce a few films," he says.

"I produced I Shot Andy Warhol, which, I guess, was another film about real-life violence, and I produced a film called Go Fish. So I always felt I was in the business.

"There were odd projects that came and went. I first investigated doing Savage Grace 10 years ago with The Really Useful Company, Andrew Lloyd Weber's firm. It never happened, but it was brave of that sort of company to take an interest."

Yes, indeed. It is hard to imagine Savage Grace emanating from the same source as Starlight Express or Cats. Told in the form of four discrete episodes, the picture, which stars Julianne Moore as Barbara and Eddie Redmayne as Tony, her troubled son, does not baulk at showing the depraved depths to which the family sank.

Barbara seems to have been affected by a class of narcissism so pathological that she felt compelled to take control of Tony's sexual development.

The film's final catastrophe is preceded by a sequence of such queasy lubriciousness that it is hard to watch without gagging. On a lazy afternoon in London, Moore is seen offering her adult son a most inappropriate personal service. The scene is, by the standards of modern cinema, only modestly explicit, but the context turns it into something quite uncomfortable.

"A number of people have said to me: 'Why do we have to go there?'" he says. "It's an understandable question. But this film is very much about character. It is important to show the degree of her narcissism and that comes through in the belief that she can help her son in this way. It's important to show the horror of a mother 'mothering' her child in this terrible way."

It must have been a difficult scene for Julianne Moore to play.

"Oh sure, and it was a tricky scene for us all to shoot," he says. "But Julianne is a very brave actress. I know that she did get annoyed when people asked her whether she identified with Barbara at all. 'Of course not,' she'd say. 'I have two children. What do you think?' There is a very clear difference between identification and the kind of empathy an actor will manage."

Histories of the Baekeland case have concluded that Barbara seduced her son as a way of "curing" him of his homosexuality. Such a curious explanation only makes a diagnosis of her mental state more difficult to achieve.

Savage Grace, which is based on an acclaimed book by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson, makes no attempt to dissect Barbara's mental state. Yet, while watching the film, one does find oneself mentally flicking through the lexicon of psychiatric disorders. "There is some truth in that," he says. "But I didn't want to get into a diagnosis like in that terrible last scene in Hitchcock's Psycho. It's interesting. The book details how Tony heard voices as a child and was sent to counselling sessions. That may have been connected with his troubles later in life. Yet Barbara, who was at least as troubled, never received the same treatment. Nobody paid attention."

She was, perhaps, just dismissed as a "hysterical woman".

"I think that's right. It should have been clear that she was f***ing nuts. But in those days it was ignored."

Savage Grace, an eerie nightmare of a film, has divided critics on its release in the United States. But no thinking person could deny that it is the work of a very singular film-maker. Somehow Kalin manages to evoke a weird sympathy for people driven to the most terrible acts. It is to be hoped he won't wait another decade before offering us another true-life murder drama.

"I was looking at another project: a study of the relationship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. But Patti was a little wary of it. So that didn't happen. There are a few other things I've planned and I know it will not be such a long wait until the next film." He has to do another true-life murder. Themed films come in threes. That's the rule. "Well I'm sorry," he laughs. "I don't think I'll be completing the trilogy any time soon."

Savage Grace is showing at the Light House Cinema, Smithfield, Dublin, until July 25th