Todd Haynes's personal baptism in the commercial mainstream. It starts out as if it could be an extension of one of the three plot strands in his 16mm black-and-white homoerotic undergrounder, Poison -- the science-fictional strand to do with a "Leper Sex Killer on the Loose." An AIDS metaphor, unmistakably. Here in Safe, a well-off, well-insulated, self-described "homemaker" (catching herself halfway through "housewife") comes down with something labelled "environmental illness" or "chemical impairment." Another AIDS metaphor, surely. Possibly weakened, or just as possibly in some deviously inverted way strengthened, by the subtle implication that this soulless suburbanite somehow deserves it -- or at any rate does not deserve much sympathy. (How do you like it, lady?) The first half of the movie works quite well as a quiet, sedate, low-low-low-key satire on the lifestyle of the rich and famished. (Major crisis when the new couch is delivered: "Oh, my God! This is not what we ordered! We did not order black!") Julianne Moore plays the heroine as an ambulatory -- better yet, somnambulatory -- Barbie Doll. (An extension, on this front, of Haynes's cultish puppet film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.) And the director, editorializing nonstop through his compositions, places her at a ten-foot-pole distance in chilly, empty, geometrized interiors -- a paper-thin figure pinned against a backdrop of Mondrian-like, Rothko-like rectangles. The second half of the movie -- once the heroine checks herself into the Wrenwood Center, a "chemical-free zone" or "safe haven" in the New Mexico desert -- is more problematical. The low-low-low key is unfalteringly sustained, if not even undetectably lowered a notch. The tone becomes difficult to pinpoint. The New Age inspirationalism -- the folksy pep talk of the AIDS-afflicted holistic guru, the folkie guitar-and-vocal musical interlude -- is offered up perfectly deadpan. Cackles and snickers, while not dying out entirely, grow uneasier. And the greatest suspense that begins to build is not over the fate of our heroine, but over the seriousness of the filmmaker. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd