Film review: Swan Song is a bittersweet celebration of a whole generation of gay men
Udo Kier in Swan Song
★★★★★
Once ‘the Liberace of Sandusky’, the small Ohio town where he ran the only beauty salon, Pat Pitsenbarger (Udo Kier) is decidedly less flamboyant as Swan Song (12A) opens.
Now in his 80s, the former drag queen is living in an assisted living facility, shuffling around in a grey tracksuit and Velcro-strap trainers. But when a lawyer for his most famous client, the socialite Rita Parker Sloan (Linda Evans), arrives at the care home to offer Pat $25,000 to style Rita’s hair for her funeral, the old spark is reignited. Now all Pat has to do is escape his living hell and track down a gallon or so of Vivante, the styling product that maintained Rita’s coiffure during their long years of friendship.
Writer-director Todd Stephens made his name with the American Pie-style romp Another Gay Movie (2006), but Swan Song couldn’t be more different in theme and tone: there’s an elegiac quality to Pat’s return to Sandusky, which he knows is a kind of lap of honour, a final accounting for a life lived to the full. Flat broke (when he does scrounge $20, Pat immediately blows it on a glass of fine wine and a fat tip for the handsome young waiter) and bewildered by his surroundings, Pat returns to his old haunts only to discover that all is changed, changed utterly — even the nightclub where he pioneered Sandusky’s first drag night and gay scene is being converted into a gastropub.
Udo Kier is utterly brilliant here, giving the inherently fabulous Pat an irascible twinkle and an indefatigable spirit. ‘I wouldn’t even know how to be gay anymore,’ he sighs as he observes two young gay men playing ball with their son, but by then the viewer is fully aware that Swan Song is a bittersweet celebration of a whole generation of gay men who were the scouts and the pathfinders.
(cinema release)
