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Source: New Statesman (1996), Oct 23, 1998 v127 n4408 p35(2).

Title: Velvet Goldmine._(movie reviews)
Author: Jonathan Romney

Subjects: Motion pictures - Reviews
People: Haynes, Todd
Meyers, Jonathan Rhys
McGregor, Ewan
Rev Grade: A

Electronic Collection: A21262305
RN: A21262305


Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Statesman and Nation Publishing Company
Ltd. (UK)

"Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction,"
teasingly announce the opening titles to Velvet Goldmine, "it
should be played at full volume." Todd Haynes's extraordinary
panorama of the glamrock years seems certain to face resistance
from British audiences, who usually like to know for sure whether
they're dealing with fact or fiction. Besides, its hyper-camp
polysexual pitch flies violently in the face of 1990s rock-geezer
culture. It won't pull the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
audience, that's for sure.

This is not the real glam story, though. Instead of a David Bowie
biopic, it's a fantasy about a Bowie-esque young thing called Brian
Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who enjoys a torrid romance with
American star Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), closely modelled on Iggy
Pop. Bowie-ires may well hate the film, not only for its cartoon
image of the True Facts, but also because Haynes presents his hero
as a confused opportunist, a cultural magpie cribbing
indiscriminately from a multitude of role models, before cashing in
his chips for the conformist rock dreams of the 1980s.

Velvet Goldmine should be read as a fantasy, and like the best
fantasies, it's fabulously superficial at first sight, before
revealing hidden depths and resonances. It uses the Bowie story
much as Slade uses the images of history. This is a fan's dream of
pop history, by a director who was too young to be in the thick of
it at the time. Although Velvet Goldmine has been touted as a
British film, because of its stars and Film on Four's production
involvement, it's very much an American director's fantasy about
Englishness - a rifling, at transatlantic arm's length, of motifs
from pop's past and the gay history that informed it. The
references run from Oscar Wilde, through music hall drag, through
the parlare slang of 1960s gay subculture, to the short-lived
revolution of glam's mascara-masquerade.

Velvet Goldmine is in every sense a made-up story about made-up
people. Like Bowie, Slade invents himself piecemeal, but that
hardly invalidates him or makes him less "authentic" - a word which
has never been much use in pop history. Ever since emerging in the
early 1990s as a front runner in what was briefly hailed as the
"New Queer Cinema", Todd Haynes has shown a cultural analyst's eye
for the paradoxes of identity and the prerogatives of fantasy. His
debut feature, Poison, was inspired by Jean Genet, the high priest
of transgressive self-invention and another Bowie hero. In Velvet
Goldmine, he mischievously alludes to his early short Superstar, a
biopic of Karen Carpenter acted out by Barbie dolls. A young girl
plays with two boy dolls customised in the guise of Brian and Curt,
who declare their passion before falling into a clinch.

That, Haynes reminds us, is what fan fantasy is for - a way of
possessing your idols by turning them into your personal toys. The
stars in this story are like puppets - of the media, of their
audiences, of each other. And, as such, we can't expect them to
have any "depth". At a press conference, Slade dazzles with flashes
of lapidary philosophical wit - until you realise that the words
are all Oscar Wilde's, and that he's reading them from cue cards.

Velvet Goldmine is similarly composed of quotations. It's a gaudy
patchwork of different film stock, camera styles, spot-on
soundtrack pastiches, and wildly differing styles of performance -
Rhys Meyers' fazed-Narcissus blankness, Eddie Izzard's punchy Tin
Pan Alley hucksterism, Toni Collette's vampy archness as Slade's
wife. And central to a film that is justifiably infatuated with
look is Sandy Powell's wardrobe, the whole gamut from catwalk
dazzle to Oxfam satin-and-tat.

Velvet Goldmine recognises that pop revolutions are invariably
short-lived and their seismic effects often denied by the very
people that caused them. The polysexual youthquake that Slade
heralds has its phoney side, too: the film is good on the way that
conformist youth culture latched on to Bowie's bisexuality as a
flag of convenience, and the extras casting is rife with what used
to be derided as the "mascara'd brickie" look. And, although it's
not referred to directly, you can't help remembering how glam's
direct descendant, punk, rejected its sexual complexity like a
puritanical teenager disowning a scandalous aunt.

This flamboyantly complex film can be taken in different ways: as a
giddy fan letter, as a serious essay in gay cultural archaeology,
as stretching the language of pop cinema beyond the MTV cliches.
But even the fact that it often seems superficial and cartoonish
should be applauded - this is pure cinematic dandyism, too rare in
these downbeat screen days. You'll learn next to nothing about the
real history of glam, but a lot about why 1970s teenagers embraced
the risque pleasures of expensive guitars and cheap eyeliner.

"Velvet Goldmine" (18) opens on 23 October at selected cinemas
nationwide.


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