Film
Hedwig and the Angry Inch + performances & Q&A
- Director
- John Cameron Mitchell
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 95 mins
Back in 2001, this was promoted as the new Rocky Horror Picture Show, but apart from its leading European trans-sexual transvestite John Cameron Mitchell’s surreal film adaptation of his successful off-Broadway musical has little in common with that wearisomely camp student-pleaser. What it does have, however, is a vitality, energy and originality that’s likely to divide audiences. Think the Wayne/Jayne County story with gags and better songs, and you’ll be in the right ballpark.
Born into poverty in grim communist East Berlin, Hansel submits to a sex-change operation to become Hedwig (Mitchell) in order to marry an American GI and flee to freedom. Alas, the op is botched, leaving Hedwig with the titular angry inch of stubby penis. Alone, divorced and miserable in a Kansas trailer park, where she passes the time playing American rock with a band of Korean army wives and doing odd jobs, “mostly the job we call blow,” Hedwig becomes involved with a classic rock-obsessed Jesus freak (“He introduced me to Boston, Kansas, Asia, Europe, America . . . Travel exhausts me,” she quips), who later steals all her songs and goes on to become global ladyboy superstar Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Suitably outraged, Hedwig recruits a pan-Slavic rock band, inevitably dubbed the Angry Inch, and sets out to shadow Gnosis on his US tour. Alas, while Gnosis is playing enormodomes, the Inch are reduced to touring a chain of seafood restaurants named Bilgewaters, where Hedwig’s impassioned laments to his cruelly downsized todger are greeted with a mixture of indifference and bemusement.
If the synopsis thus far sounds weird, wait until you see the rudimentary animated inserts in the style of an early ‘70s Czechoslovakian cartoon and the bizarre finale: a four-song cycle in which Hedwig finally finds peace after having an internal confrontation with her other half. Clearly, this won’t be to all tastes, but the plentiful trash-rock songs are a cut above the usual standard of banal musicals even if the lyrics are often piffle and/or centred on Hedwig’s genital mutilation trauma. But there’s something likeable about this indefatigable “internationally ignored song stylist,” thanks largely to Mitchell’s empathic performance in a role he obviously knows intimately. Fans of rock’s top panto dames, from Bowie to Manson, should also find much to enjoy.
is needed now More than ever
Queer Vision’s screening at the Cube includes performances by musician Brook Tate and Carmen Monoxide, and will be followed by a Q&A with comedians Jayde Adams and Rosie Jones.
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