PREVIEW
HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
Starring John Cameron Mitchell and Michael Pitt
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell
Opens August 10
Uptown Screen
Hedwig and the Angry Inch plumbs the velvet goldmine
John Cameron Mitchell takes his punk rock drag queen from stage to screen
Mere mortals cannot even begin to quantify its fabulousness. Passionate, imaginative and very hard-rocking, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a modern movie musical that makes Moulin Rouge and Dancer in the Dark look hollow and heartless. It's good enough to bring you to your knees, like David Bowie fellating Mick Ronson's guitar back in the gender-bending glam-rock era that songs like "The Origin of Love" and "Tear Me Down" so lovingly evoke.
Written for the screen and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, who originated the title role of Hedwig, the film is also a very different animal than the stage production that became an off-Broadway hit in New York in the late ’90s. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is still the story of Hedwig (Mitchell), an "internationally ignored song stylist" and victim of a botched sex change back in East Berlin. Backed by his band the Angry Inch, Hedwig regaled theatre audiences with tales of how most of his-her penis and his-her heart were lost along the way to rock semi-stardom. But Mitchell has given characters that existed only in monologues – like Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), the boy rock star who Hedwig creates, loves and loses – physical form and fuller storylines. Moreover, the previously bare-boned presentation of Stephen Trask's clever, credible songs is replaced with a wig-tastic array of often outlandish set pieces.
While in Toronto for the film's Canadian premiere at the Inside Out gay and lesbian film festival, Mitchell (who's much more low-key than his alter ego) explained that Hedwig's transition from stage to screen was planned over a long period of time.
"We developed it for four years before we did it off-Broadway," he says. "We'd do it at people's birthday parties or benefits – no gig seemed unusual. And as I was writing ideas, I'd think, ‘That won't work onstage, but it would be good for the film….’ When we got the play going successfully and suddenly people were saying, 'Do you want to make a film?' Stephen and I said, 'You know, we thought about that, and this is the kind of thing we'd like to do.'"
Instead of repeating the play's cabaret-style framework of one gig, they created a tour for Hedwig, one that shadows the much more popular arena tour of Tommy Gnosis.
"It takes place in a chain of seafood restaurants," says Mitchell. "It was a place that had just been abandoned in a strip mall, and we designed it as Bilgewater's. It's a theme restaurant and the theme is maritime disasters. That was part of the shtick in the play from a few years before, when we performed it in a hotel where the Titanic survivors stayed. So it was the many years of accumulation of shtick and detail and thoughts that suddenly came together when presented with this opportunity of making the film."
Audiences expecting a garish drag-queen revue may be surprised by the film's emotional potency as Hedwig struggles toward a sense of wholeness and understanding. That's because however weird Hedwig's world may seem, it always feels real.
"The way I thought about it is that I wanted the world to seem possible," says Mitchell. "Like I'd tell the wig designer, 'You can go crazy because this is Hedwig, but she has to look like she can afford it.' Whereas in other movies about drag queens, it's pure fantasy, and you detach because it starts to be too much."
Mitchell directed the film because he'd grown bored with the acting and had too many strong ideas to cede control. In creating the screen Hedwig, he says he was inspired by the ways that shifts between fantasy and reality were handled in two somewhat unlikely sources – Bob Fosse's All That Jazz and Hal Ashby's Being There.
"In All That Jazz," he says, "each scene is shot differently – there are some scenes with no sound, some scenes where the song is motivated because they're in a rehearsal situation, others that are purely in his head. I realized that because there was a strong central character with a strong journey, you could shoot every scene quite differently – it's all through Hedwig's eyes.
And there was something in the tone of Being There. It's almost a fairy tale but everyone's acting very real."
Then, of course, there's the music, given added sonic muscle on the soundtrack by Bob Mould and Girls Against Boys. Many of Trask's songs are as strong as the best work of the singers Hedwig calls "the crypto-homo rockers" – Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. First conceived in the New York club Squeezebox, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a tribute to rock's longtime romance with sexual ambiguity.
"Rock 'n' roll and drag have always been together," says Mitchell.
"Little Richard, glam rock, Jayne County… Mick Jagger was always a big queen in his own way. Squeezebox was the first predominantly gay rock club that I or anyone had heard of, so it was liberating. All these drag queens who had been consigned to lip-synching Diana Ross suddenly realized they didn't need to have such a great voice to sing punk rock." |
