Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Todd Stephens
Starring: Udo Kier, Jennifer Coolidge, Linda Evans, Michael Urie
You wonder at what point it will be when you realise that you’ve become
old. Maybe you see a picture of yourself from just a few years ago, and
the fresh-faced adult in the frame is a markedly optimistic counterpoint
to the progressively gaunt looking fella in the mirror, and the ensuing
cold realisation that age is creeping in makes you feel like shit. Perhaps
you, suddenly, have no idea what music is about anymore, and this cultural
uncertainty makes you duly feel so far out of touch and so much like shit.
Most mortifyingly, in hoary rite of passage as inevitable as it is
torturous, you will one day look around at the increasingly younger people
in the club and feel just like a parent, and just like shit. Let’s face
it, getting old is shit.
Take Pat Pitsenbarger (a career best Udo Kier), an elderly gay man
rattling around an antiseptic care home with just his memories and a few
condescending words from the nurses to haunt his day. It didn’t use to be
like this: once upon a time as a prodigiously talented and flamboyant
hairdresser, Pat was the queen of Sandusky, Ohio, feted for his
instrumental role in the small-town gay scene.
Based upon a true story, Swan Song reconfigures the real
life Pitsenbarger, who, among other acts of cultural heroism, was one of
the first people to open a gay bar in such conservative contexts. The
film, however, picks up with him at the dog end of his life when the
glitter has faded, and life, and the gay experience, both so fast moving,
have sashayed on... Could there be time and space for one last hurrah?
One fateful morning, Pat receives an instruction to return to Sandusky to
fulfil the dying wishes of his ex-client, whose last will and testament
specifies that he be the one to prepare her for the funeral. There was
some sort of unpleasantness between the two in the past (which will be
carefully and emotively revealed across the narrative), but Pitsenbarger,
instead of marking time in the care home, ultimately decides to seize the
day and engage the central conceit of Swan Song: Pat’s road trip back to Sandusky, and his journey of discovery along
the way.
Writer/director Todd Stephens’ film is in many ways about how male
homosexual culture has evolved over the last three decades, progressions
which the film positions as cautiously positive developments. It saves its
true emotional focus, however, for examining the specifically brutal
phenomena of being an aged queen. As established, getting old is a terrible business where anybody is
concerned. But for gay men of Pitsenbarger’s vintage there were/are
further tiers of cruelty. Pat’s friends, and his beloved partner whose
image haunts him in sudden moments of heartbreak, have succumbed to AIDS.
Furthermore, the opportunities for someone like Pat to create a family
were limited then, so getting on entails solitude. And, look, the
inconvenient truth of it all is that male gay culture is one which is
almost entirely preoccupied with youth and beauty. What place is there for
an almost septuagenarian in this world, however fabulous? (Kier’s
performance really is something it must be said, he’s having so much fun
with the role and imbues it with incredible, relatable pathos).
Is there a deliberately uncomfortable nostalgia in Swan Song? The idea that way back when, being gay, with certain aspects of society
dead set against you and the necessity for glamorous subterfuge, was
somehow more special and even exciting than the current mainstream
acceptance of the LGBTQ+ existence? One of Pat’s contemporaries, cottaging
in a public toilet (what people did before Grindr), bemoans that he
doesn’t know ‘how to be gay anymore’, while whimsically looking at a same
sex couple and their kid across the way. A poignant contradiction in this
wonderfully entertaining film is the suggestion that being gay now perhaps
isn’t the party which it used to be. But all parties must come to an end,
a reality which Pat, and we, come to terms with throughout the film. At
one glorious point, however, the lads in the club which Pat used to own,
young and old, all let off steam (and how! I cannot think of a film where
the dancing has seemed so spontaneous and joyful) upon a vibrant
dancefloor to Robyn (♥). It’s reassuring to know that some things will
never get old.
Swan Song is on UK/ROI VOD now.
