Greeted with mass critical swooning when it reached the cinema, Todd Haynes's affectionate revisiting of 1950s melodrama and Douglas Sirk's pictures in particular, largely lives up to the hype.
You don't have to be a big Sirk fan to get wrapped up in both the sumptuous colour scheme, in which Haynes' characters' clothes vie with a glowing Connecticut autumn, or the taboos of the time which so cruelly trap its likeable characters.
Two problems fire the plot: husband Dennis Quaid's latent homosexuality, requiring "heterosexual conversion" or "hormonal rebalancing", and wife Julianne Moore's growing friendship with black gardener Dennis Haysbert.
Where Pleasantville entertainingly time-travelled back to the uptight 50s from a modern perspective, Haynes plays it as though his film is being released in the year it is set, 1957, aided by a marvellous bittersweet Elmer Bernstein score of the kind you don't hear any more.
It's surprising what a pleasant, and odd, sensation this is, with the invaluable assistance of Julianne Moore's poised perfection as a personification of the decade devoted to domestic bliss.
It's done with great sensitivity and style, but the style never overwhelms the content.
The DVD includes a "making of" documentary and commentary from Haynes, who quotes liberally from Sirk and Fassbinder, whose own rough remake of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Fear Eats the Soul, was both powerful and radically different from this one.
