Imitation of Life (1959)

There's something a little icky in the experience of watching Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. Part of it, I think, is how difficult it is to escape the sneaking suspicion of exploitation that comes with a major Hollywood studio centering a Black actor purely to celebrate…

sakana1

93/100 Douglas Sirk is a master of feeling, and Imitation of Life is no exception. Viewing a Sirk film is like knowingly diving into a kiddie pool, embracing its mush and melodrama, but as soon as you hit the water, its depths are unexpected and gorgeously profound.…

SilentDawn

''How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?'' Well with this, my second Douglas Sirk film after All That Heaven Allows, I can recognise the intuitive gaze of a man of European descent, and how he saw American society and dutifully applied bitter critique and…

Rod Sedgwick

i just wanna throw myself against the wall and sob in technicolor while wearing a housedress

nora

sirk spends so much time allowing his characters to articulate their hopes and dreams, their contradictions and flaws; it's an act of pure artistic generosity. there's a genuine love for all of these people that takes the story beyond stereotypes and into a heightened…

comrade_yui

Imitation of Life is both a tragedy and a celebration of our differences as human beings and the challenges that come with age and maturity. Sirk understands how to combine the chic, bubblegum, eye-popping style with citations of suburbia and racism, ensuring that the…

Sam

"How do you explain to your child that she was born to be hurt?" It's instructive to see this and the 1934 versions as reflecting the same core themes through the radically different prisms of their eras. The '34 film, truer to the book, is bound to Depression-era…

Jake Cole

"oh mother, stop acting. stop trying to shift people around as if they were pawns on a stage". routine as performance. something like an aegis of formal control, sirk orchestrates a circus of appearances and illusions just to show us how fragile everything actually is, in…

Diogo Serafim

É um absurdo como Imitações da Vida atinge as mais diversas camadas do exagero narrativo, dramático e corporal do melodrama. Douglas Sirk caminha de forma orgânica pelos dilemas de cada uma das mulheres, fazendo com que as interseções entre eles não discorram de forma…

Philippe Leão