Arts & Entertainment Preview | July/August 2001 | Sponsored by Chrysler
by Ella Taylor
Hansel & Hedwig
John Cameron Mitchell stars in Hedwig and the Angry Inch
For a movie described by its writer and director, John Cameron Mitchell, as "a post-punk neo-glam rock musical" inspired by a Platonic myth, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is marvelously accessible, without in the least resorting to the cuddly mainstreaming that has defanged so much of contemporary gay film. Based on Mitchell's critically lauded off-Broadway stage show, the movie stars the bitchily charismatic Mitchell as "internationally ignored" drag artist Hedwig, who tours the enchantingly named Bilgewater chain of restaurants with his band, the better to stalk a former protégé and lover who stole his songs and became an overnight rock sensation as Tommy Gnosis (played with goofy innocence by Michael Pitt). Hedwig began life as Hansel, a lonely East German lad whose feverish imagination is fed on the one hand by the pop music he hears on the American Forces radio network, and on the other by a bedtime story from hell, as interpreted by his draconian mother. The story, told in the movie through amusingly primitivist animation sequences, derives from Plato's tale of human origins, in which everyone had two heads, four arms, and four legs in one body until the gods, fearing the humans' power, split them in two, condemning them to walk the earth forever looking for their other halves. It is this search for romantic completion that lends Hedwig its universality, but Cameron is fearless about approaching it through his own arcane prism. Abandoned in a Kansas trailer by an American GI who married him on the condition that he undergo a sex-change operation (it was botched, leaving Hansel with the inch that becomes "what I have to work with"), Hansel becomes Hedwig, but his twin longings for recognition and fusion with a desired other rage unabated. As first-time directors go, Mitchell is remarkably poised and bold with form: Hedwig's story is told in song, with an exuberant rock score composed by Stephen Trask, who also plays the bandleader Skszp. At the close, the movie drops its angry hilarity for a sublimely enigmatic grace note, at once wistful and hopeful, in which we see Hedwig, stripped of all her finery, padding tentatively down a rain-soaked street to a headily uncertain destiny.
Powell's Poetry
The story goes that Winston Churchill, after seeing Michael Powell's 1943 film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—and taking it, doubtless correctly, as a political attack on himself—fumed that this time, that Powell fellow had gone too far. To which Powell, one of Britain's finest filmmakers and a hero to the best among today's directors, from Mike Leigh to Martin Scorsese, sweetly responded that he thought that was the whole idea. As anyone who has seen Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), or Peeping Tom (1960) knows, going too far was Powell's credo. Though his visual style hardly seems over the top by today's goose-'em-or-lose-'em standards, his images harbor a dazzling emotional intensity without benefit of special effects. Now the boutique art-house distributor Milestone Film & Video, which already deserves a medal for restoring and recirculating such lost classics as Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma, has released to video Powell's gorgeous 1937 first feature, The Edge of the World (beautifully restored by the British Film Institute), the story of two clans torn apart in a tiny Scottish Isles crofting community. As always in Powell's movies, people go to exhilaratingly absurd extremes for love, or at least for their lives' passion. In this case, two insanely heroic—and, by all commonsense criteria, pointless—attempts to scale an impossibly sheer cliff at the edge of perennially stormy seas end in private tragedy; this is compounded by the consequences for the villagers (played by themselves and a wonderful cast featuring John Laurie, Finlay Currie, and Belle Chrystall), who are already taxed beyond endurance by the harsh conditions under which they live. As much as it is about the vital durability of love, The Edge of the World is also the story of the death of an era. (It's hard to believe that the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier wasn't inspired by this film's austere black-and-white lyricism to make his own wildly romantic melodrama, Breaking the Waves.) "Don't tell anyone—I'm a poet," an impishly immodest Powell remarks to the camera in a charming 1978 documentary postscript to the film, in which he goes back to the location, the island of St. Kilda, with his crew. No need to tell; it's all right there on the screen. (800-603-1104; $29.95 plus shipping.)
