The 52: Swan Song
From June 2023 to June 2024 I'll be watching a lgbtqia+ film each week and coming back here with my thoughts, feelings and plenty of hopes we aren't met with the "kill your gays" trope. I call this The 52.
Jennifer Coolidge? You’re telling me Jennifer “the gays love me” Coolidge was in this, said the iconic line “I’m sowwy” and didn’t win any lifetime achievement awards? The world is rigged.
Swan Song was not at all that I expected, and for the first 15-20 minutes I was highly doubting my choice to sit down and crochet on a sunday morning with it. There’s a grainy quality to the film, as if it’s been made in 2003 by someone who doesn’t exactly have a handle on their camera settings, and the cast is seemingly littered with anyone and everyone (and Brandon Lim, which got me wondering what Trixie had to say). You would quick change from rural america to Michael Urie in a manner of minutes and the quality of acting and how wildly it shifted was… jarring, to say the least.
There were moments I felt the story of the film was lost, and while retrospect makes mostly everything come together (except the napkins?) I still feel there could have been more of the good stuff and less of the bizarre.
And this film truly has the bizarre! Following Pat Pitsenbarger, an icon of the gay community and once upon a time hairdresser, we relive moments from his past as he journeys to do the hair of a woman he simultaneously loved and loathed. We see ghosts, we see reality warped, we see scenes that, in a blink, are proved to have been entirely dreamed up, and this intermingled with reality made following the story an unsteady thing to grasp.
Pat, and Udo Kier who portrays him, is an icon. A character played with subtlety that I didn’t notice at first, witnessing his transformation from quiet, near silent man existing in a nursing home that felt more like a prison, to the embodiment of a queen, his interactions with the current queer community and people in his old life was beautiful and painful and, ultimately, incredibly moving.
Swan Song wasn’t perfect, but I would be a fool not to recognise it’s importance.
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