dir. Todd Haynes
st. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ewan McGregor, Toni Collette, Christian Bale
Rated MA
Running Time: 122mins
Releases November 4th

Film previews at Planet Hollywood and the Greater Union private theaterette are about the only time you get to have a beer with the big screen. And yes, it makes a difference. At the Chauvel you can enjoy a drink in the foyer but you can't take it in with you. For Velvet Goldmine, a tall VB on tap made the film that much more enjoyable. Cold flushes and gloriously aerated gulps accelerated the film's meandering yet tactile, multi-textured pastiche of 70's extravagance and 80's banality. As a tacky spectacle of loud body-hugging costumes, glitter makeup and glam rock performances, the look of this film is highly reminiscent of Pennebaker's rockumentary 'Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars' (a rare cultural artefact available for $3 from Dr. Watts Bondi Junction!) documenting David Bowie's end-of-an-era concept band in which a narcissistic rock star is killed by his fans. Velvet Goldmine, an appropriately ponderous and ridiculous title, exhibits many parallels to Bowie's high-camp experiments, tracing the self-destructive decadence and image-obsession that ended the otherwise liberatory and catalytic glam-rock movement. Christian Bale plays an ex-pat British journalist in 1980's New York, researching an article to mark the 10th anniversary of the staged assasination of Brian Slade (Rhys Meyers), a Bowie-inspired media star. Bale's after-the-fact investigation acts as a base for the narrative, which aggregates in uneven layers as Slade's various hanger-on's provide fragments of testimonial flashback - a reference to the post-death investigation structure used in Citizen Kane. The fragmentary narrative structure suffers from a few too many diversionary rock performances and the toneless anecdotes of secondary characters, but on the other hand conveys both the emotional wasteland of teenage suburbanism and the nihilistic excesses of its pop-gods.

If the endless music is not to taste, one thing this production can boast is interesting production design and cinematography, enticingly lush yet ridiculously decadent. It carries to a point the heady liberation of personal dresscodes, behaviour and sexuality which gathered momentum throughout the 70's to define so much of our world today. The separation of audio and visual image-tracks at the beginning of the film also creates interesting distancing effects, with music, voiceover and location sound reducing the image to moving wallpaper. But is it just affect without effect? Whilst the filmmakers clearly found a certain freedom in glam rock deviancy, the over-produced nature of the final cut spreads the characterisations a bit thin. Director Haynes repeatedly lapses into documentary and music-video modes, attempting to enrich but arguably diluting the movie's coherency with rather weakly associated images of schoolchildren, references to Oscar Wilde and the obligatory frustrated teen-masturbation vignette.

It is, in all, a bit too much velvet and not enough gold, too many gleeful cultural references belonging to another generation; theirs, and not mine.

eugene chew
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