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Velvet Goldmine (US,
1998, 127 minutes, written and directed by Todd Haynes, with Ewan
McGregor (Curt Wild), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Brian Slade), Christian Bale (Arthur Stuart),
Toni Collette (Mandy Blade))Let's start with the screamingly obvious. This film is about David Bowie, Iggy Pop and the whole glam rock era of the Seventies. It would be impossible to miss the point, just as it would be impossible to overlook the fact that there is no Bowie on the soundtrack and not draw one's own conclusions about why Bowie wouldn't like a picture that persists in linking him to homosexuality and decadence (just as the fact that there is a lot of Iggy on it suggests he's not practicing revisionist history yet). What a soundtrack, by the way - almost worth the movie by itself...Eno, Roxy Music, T-Rex, New York Dolls, etc.
There is some twaddle in it about Oscar Wilde (I mean, by naming the Iggy character Curt Wild, you are asking for it, not to mention the allusion to Bowie's fave, Kurt Weill) and aliens (several characters have these green emerald pieces of jewelry, as is seen at the beginning when Oscar is supposedly left on Earth by aliens in 1854), and some fairy tale mockery (Haynes likes to throw everything into his pictures - in fact, at one point, he even cheekily uses Barbie dolls, as he did in his notoriously banned "The Karen Carpenter Story", to have the Iggy and Bowie (here, Brian Slade) characters declare their love for one another) - but that is window dressing, and, frankly, a bit too silly to entirely stomach.
The plot, as such, deals with Arthur Stuart, a reporter, trying to track Slade down ten years after Slade faked his assasination on stage and dropped out of sight. He does eventually find him, as a cabaret type performer with no soul (hmmm...and, since this happens around 1984, I guess we can figure out what Haynes' view on the respectable Eighties Bowie would be...).
The movie is very decadent, and even has (gasp!) full frontal male nudity at points. It's a delightfully evil, depraved piece of work, for the most part.
Haynes does like to play mix and match, though, throwing together characters and situations that did not happen that way in 'reality', just to keep us on our toes (and possibly to avoid lawsuits?). And one does have to wonder just how many coincidences could happen to link Arthur Stuart to the whole Slade camp...how many concerts did he attend? how many backstages did he get to?
Personally, I found the Wild character more interesting than the Slade character, particularly in the performance pieces (without exception, the Slade pieces seemed like mean-spirited Bowie parodies - while that was probably the intention, it seemed a little vicious even for a slam...), even though, as several reviewers have pointed out, the actor looks more like Kurt Cobain (another reason for the name, perhaps?) than Iggy Pop, which adds a whole other level of allusion. (And the fact that Michael Stipe, a friend of Kurt's, executive produced the picture cannot be forgotten).
It is, as Haynes himself has said, a hallucinatory trip of a picture. If you watch it in that light, and try to avoid disbelief and, certainly, looking at your watch (it's about half an hour too long), it can be an entertaining, nostalgic and strangely sexy piece of fluff (I actually found the love scenes between Wild and Slade beautiful, and I'm not much for love scenes in movies...). Not a classic...but an interesting and campy mockumentary...
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