Phyllis and Harold

Phyllis and Harold is an astoundingly frank journey through a disastrous 59-year-marriage. Drawing on a lifetime of her family’s home movies and interviews made over 12 years, filmmaker Cindy Kleine mixes reportage, cinema verité and animation to uncover family secrets and tell a story that could not be shown publicly as long as her father was alive. Phyllis and Harold delves into the mystery of time passing, the nature of living a life, and the challenges of losing those we love. But is is also a loving, funny exposé on the sins of suburbia. Imagine Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage seen through the prism of I Love Lucy.

Director’s statement:

When I first had the idea to make a film about my parents I conceived of it as a work of fiction. Though we have all seen many films about bad marriages, this story was a dramatic one: the 1940’s, a torrid romantic affair, marriage, adultery, passion, secrets, separation, depression, 1950’s parenthood, world travels, and forty years later, a reunion of lost lovers. It encompassed a lot, and told by me, the daughter, or a character based on me, could be a smash Hollywood hit in the old style.

I began writing a script that I worked on over the course of many years, and kept coming back to amid all my other projects. There was a character based on me, the daughter, and narrator, and, even though I had never written a script before, in my fantasy of fantasies, I envisioned specific actors in the roles of my parents: Harvey Keitel would have been the ideal Harold, and Bette Davis the ideal Phyllis!

In 1995 I began to interview my parents separately about their marriage, asking them the same exact questions and getting radically different answers. For the first shoot, I invited them to visit me on Cape Cod where I was staying, knowing that, aside from needing the quiet of the country, getting them out of their day to day environment would free them to speak more frankly. I sat each of them down, one at a time, on my little terrace overlooking the marsh, in their sunglasses. From the start, I was fascinated by the fact that my mother answered the questions from an emotional place, and my father from a practical, material place. As if one was a worm, and one a bird--their points of view were that different.

I began to cut those two interviews together, his and hers, thinking I was doing so in order to transcribe the interviews for actors. But the material was so compelling as it was that at some point I realized that I could never get actors to do this in a way that would be believable. I was in love with the authenticity of the material, and there was something so palpable about the trust between each of them and me that allowed them to speak so unguardedly. It was not something that could be re-created. Everyone I showed it to agreed, and so I followed my instincts, and the result was a 20 minute film called ‘TIl Death Do Us Part, that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 1998. This film consists of the pure unadulterated interviews, talking heads, with no cutaways. Anything I tried cutting in, photos, film clips, anything, distracted from the pure cinematic and rhythmic experience of their testimonies, and simply didn’t work.

I knew then, as I always had, that this ultimately would be a much larger work; a “life’s work”, as my artist friend Ilene Sunshine kept calling it. But already there was the issue of the “secret”. My father was still alive, and I would not be able to tell the full story as long as he was, because the “secret” was still being kept from him. But eventually I decided to proceed, knowing anything I did would take a long time, and my Dad was no spring chicken, so someday I’d be able to complete it. Initially I conceived of the film ad a three part work: “’Til Death Do Us Part” would be Part 1, Part 2 would be traveling back in time via my parents reading to each other from the love letters they wrote during their courtship and early marriage, when he was in school, and then in the army, and Part 3 would be them growing old together.

But I had just begun to film for Part 3 when my father’s life came to a sudden end. It was then that the film made a turn toward something less tangible, and showed itself to be clearly a work about time, and about aging and disintegration. One spends one’s whole life anticipating and planning for the future, looking forward, growing, expanding, and then shrinking, diminishing, letting go, and dying. Like leaves on a tree.

In the twelfth year of work on this film, I had an 80 minute cut that I felt I could take no further. The material was too close to me, and I was not a proficient enough editor technically to take it into its next stage. Many people came to me at this stage, I believe as gifts from the universe. Jonathan Oppenheim (editor/co-producer) edited with me for the last nine months, sensitively and subtly crafting the film into a complex, many-layered symphony, rhythmic and mysterious, and gently forced me to become a full fledged character- something I had tried hard to avoid all these years. Susan Lazarus (Associate Producer) and I were introduced in a yoga class by our teacher, who said, “You two should work together.” Without her I would have been lost forever in the chaotic maze of post-production. And Lisa Crafts (Animator) who was able to magically transform my ideas and dreams (literally!) into little nuggets of poetry. Her animation is the “Brechtian device” in the film—the moments of distance and freedom given to the audience to observe the story with humor and objectivity, much as I have done as the filmmaker, so the animation is, in a certain sense, me, and represents my point of view.