Behind the Candelabra & Fifi Howls from Happiness

Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh – USA) 118 minutes

Fifi Howls from Happiness (Fifi az khoshhali zooze mikeshad) (Mitra Farahani – USA/Iran/France) 96 minutes

The first I heard of Liberace was the day he died, when I was eleven years old. Within twenty-four hours I knew he was gay and had died of AIDS. And so crumbled the façade he had so assiduously maintained. The star entertainer had successfully cowed media speculation about his sexuality (though, curiously, he only felt the need to resort to suing in the less libel-friendly UK) and many of his fans were none the wiser as to the fact. Almost immediately though his homosexuality became one of the dominant things about his personality among the wider public (to be fair to the man, the attempts to out him were never motivated by emancipatory intent, so you can’t really blame him for hiding it). Another immediate effect of his death was he began to be forgotten. Liberace’s fame relied upon his presence on stage in Las Vegas and on TV holiday specials. He may have produced over forty LPs but not a single one of them lives on as testament to his fame.

Upon hearing Steven Soderbergh was to finish his filmmaking career with a Liberace biopic, I thought ‘oh yeah, Liberace, remember him.’ Like Michael Winterbottom’s recent Paul Raymond film The Look of Love, Behind the Candelabra feels like it has come a couple of decades too late. Soderbergh made the film for HBO – it has been released in cinemas internationally after premiering at Cannes – and, despite suggestions that the studios weren’t prepared to handle such a high-profile gay story, you sense they steered clear of it more because it is about the, well, forgotten Liberace. Besides, though the film is perfectly cinematic, its home is definitely on the small screen.

Behind the Candelabra is based on the memoir of Scott Thorson, Liberace’s former lover, who lived with him for several years in the late 70s and early 80s, before the pianist kicked him out as his drug problem got out of hand. Thorson (Matt Damon) is introduced to Liberace (Michael Douglas) while working as a young animal wrangler (though the film does not have him as young as he supposedly was in real life at the time – 16) and is quickly taken in, working as a chauffeur and assistant to give him something to do. Liberace seems to see more in him than in his other beaux and bizarrely suggests adopting Scott – though this may have been a publicity ploy, given that many of Liberace’s housewife fans came to assume that was their relationship. The strangeness of the demand is compounded by the plastic surgery and general make-over Scott is put through to make him resemble the older man. This backfires however when the surgeon – a wonderfully sleazy Rob Lowe in one of the film’s many casting coups – gets Scott hooked on pills as part of his ‘California diet’. The drug dependent downfall that follows is familiar from many West Coast films set in the era.

Michael Douglas won an Emmy for his portrayal of Liberace and it is hard to argue with that; if the film were eligible for the Oscars he would surely be the hot favourite for Best Actor too. Douglas inhabits Liberace effortlessly, and pulls off a performance that might have proved disastrous with the slightest false move. His Liberace has a clear sense of his impending obsolescence – a failure as a concert pianist, he reinvented himself as a hugely successful entertainer but he cannot even prevent his own brother, who plays under the same name, from chipping away at his fame. He tells Scott that he is so old he remembers the ladies playing the Wurlitzers at movie theatres; he is part of a dying world and his lawyer’s last desperate attempts to alter his death certificate to hide his cause of death are the last hurrah. Damon is quietly effective as Thorson, a man whose drug habits have never gone away – he is currently in prison for parole violation – though his performance is more biopic standard.

 Soberbergh’s direction is smooth and slick and the film whips along at a good pace, but as ever with his films there is something clinical about Behind the Candelabra and you miss the sense of ill-manneredness that might have tipped it into the realm of genius. Still, he had the inspired idea of casting Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother, providing a living link with the era that made the man huge. You imagine that, had he not succumbed to AIDS, Liberace might have enjoyed a resurgent fame in the 90s. He would probably have been able to come out of the closet and with both his camp sensibility and the faux-sophistication of the swing era coming back into fashion, he’d have been an even bigger draw than ever. As it stands, Behind the Candelabra is a curiosity, a slice of 20th century ephemera that catches momentarily a time when popular culture thrived on a necessary innocence.







Mitra Farahani’s documentary Fifi Howls from Happiness is another portrait of a gay artist in his final days. The subject is the late Iranian painter and sculptor, Bahman Mohasses, who died in 2010. Farahani, who previously directed a fascinating 2004 documentary, Taboos, on sexual attitudes in Iran, tracked Mohasses down to his hotel suite in Rome, where he has lived in exile for much of the past sixty years. Long out of Iran and his works within the country having been destroyed following the Islamic revolution, Mohasses is sufficiently forgotten by many to be considered a cult figure. Early on, we see wealthy young Iranian diaspora collectors waxing lyrical about his work, in which the influences of Ernst, Magritte and Bacon can be discerned.

    Mohasses himself is an engaging, provocative interviewee. He perorates in a semi-reactionary way, being scornful of gay marriage, reproaching the gay rights movement for ‘taking the illicit pleasure’ out of sex – he also claims that he never cruised gay men, but always young Italian guys who had girlfriends. He is also misogynistic, remarking upon the ‘bitch face’ of the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (no relation to the director) on a magazine cover. However contentious he might be though, his gregarious bronchial cackle and his gleeful wit make his every moment on screen compellingly watchable. At one point he mocks the director, saying that in the old Soviet Union, she would have got a medal pinned to her chest by Zhdanov for services to Socialist Realism (Mohasses studied art in Moscow at the very time that Zhdanov was overseeing Stalinist aesthetics).

    Farahani’s ‘services to Socialist Realism’ certainly don’t preclude her from playing the international art market, as part of the deal for Mohasses agreeing to do the film is her finding him a commission worth €100,000. Most collectors she calls baulk at the price, saying nothing has been heard of him since the Revolution, but two young Dubai-based brothers are enthusiastic and fly to Rome to meet Mohasses, who immediately plays hardball, demanding 70% payment up front. The episode is framed by Farahani, in voiceover, in reference to the meeting of the young Nicolas Poussin with the older painter Frenhofer in Balzac’s short story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’. This formal self-consciousness shifts Farahani’s film more into film-essay territory, as do the extracts from Visconti’s The Leopard, a favourite film of Mohasses, and an explicit end-of-an-era reference.

    The film ends with Mohasses’ death, though it is not clear if the scene where he shouts in distress, off camera, is that very moment. It is one of the few instances of uncomfortable voyeurism in the film, and reminds you a little of the ailing Nicholas Ray in Wim Wenders’ Nick’s Movie. The painting is unfinished, and instead the young commissioners get to take a selection of the artist’s works he has offered as guarantee. Mohasses’ niece oversees the packing away of the works, including the one which gives the film its title, a sunnier version of Munch’s ‘The Scream’ and which was the painter’s own favourite of his works. As the movers wrap the tableaux up and slide them into crates, you have the sense of the great art movements of the twentieth century being put to rest, of abstract canvases finally yielding to conceptualism and gimmickry. Mohasses was already someone who had the stamp of yesteryear about him, a man thoroughly imbued with the hope and certainties of the post-war art boom, now largely forgotten. This fine documentary will hopefully go some of the way towards keeping his memory alive, both in his native country and abroad.

The Butler & Elysium

The Butler (Lee Daniels – USA) 132 minutes

Elysium (Neill Blomkamp – USA) 109 minutes

Lee Daniels’ film à clef about the life of White House butler Cecil Gaines carries few surprises and, after the catastrophe of the inept Southern burlesque The Paperboy, that is no bad thing. The Butler is conventional to a fault and probably does too much to hold its audience’s hand – the rape of Gaines’ mother and murder of his father by a brutish plantation owner did not happen to Eugene Allen, whom the film is based on, and is a rather clunky sublimation of the legacy of slavery – but much of the film is admirably done and, though sentimental, you are rarely left feeling cheated.

Forrest Whitaker plays Gaines, a man who stumbles into service through the concerned paternal racism of his childhood employer Annabeth Westfall (Vanessa Redgrave), and who, after moving north, works his way into the White House via a Capitol Hill hotel. Gaines is pleasant and jovial but he quickly learns to be discreet as he adapts to his job in the company of a pair of cynical house staff (Cuba Gooding Jr and Lenny Kravitz). We see a succession of presidents and first ladies, who are portrayed with varying degrees of success by name actors: a painterly Eisenhower (Robin Williams), a beaming John and Jackie Kennedy (James Marsden and Minka Kelly), LBJ (Liev Schrieber) barking orders to his aides while sitting on the shitter, a fantastically shifty Nixon (John Cusack) and a solicitous Ronald and Nancy Reagan (Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda). For some reason Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are passed over, but it is Reagan’s decision to veto Congressional sanctions on Apartheid South Africa that finally prompt Cecil to quit after almost four decades of service.

What goes on in the Gaines house is more interesting though. The life of middle-class black Americans is one we seldom see in Hollywood films, for whom black life must always be a litany of drug-and-crime-tinged misery. Oprah Winfrey, making one of her rare screen appearances, plays Cecil’s alcoholic wife, Gloria. Once you get over the weirdness of Oprah playing someone else, you realise how great an actress she is. Gloria is a sharp-tongued, world-weary lady who struggles with the booze as her husband spends long hours at work, and one son (Elijah Kelly) heads off to Vietnam while the other (David Oyelowo) flirts with the Black Panthers. Louis’ drift from civil rights advocate to the Panthers is another invention of the film and it is clearly contrived to reassure mainstream audiences (he soon breaks with them and becomes a lefty Democratic politician). The film is unabashedly pro-Obama and the film ends with Cecil invited back to the White House to meet the current president, as happened with Eugene Allen in real life.

The Butler is an undemanding enough of a film, and is a bit too beholden to the current Hollywood fondness for grand narratives of origin and accomplishment. But it is hard to find major fault with it – the acting is good throughout (Whitaker in particular) and it’s handsomely mounted, with excellent music by the Portuguese composer Rodrigo Leão. One can sense a raft of Oscar nominations awaiting – it’s really that sort of film – but I wouldn’t begrudge it its moment in the sun, even if it is a film that is unlikely to be remembered for long after.






Hollywood ventures into vulgar Marxism once again with Neill Blomkamp’s futuristic utopia/dystopia follow-up to the surprise sci-fi hit District 9. The year is 2154 and the great and the good have long given up on Earth, wracked by pollution, environmental catastrophe and crime. The rich have decamped to Elysium, a habitable sealed-atmosphere space-station that looks like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey and which is lovingly landscaped with manicured lawns and the sort of aseptic neo-classical architecture that the American moneyed classes imagine to be the acme of good taste. It’s not unlike the hermetic, tax-free paradises advocated by Silicon Valley libertarians such as Peter Thiel, and William Fichtner, who plays John Carlyle, the villainous military systems CEO in cahoots with Elysian Secretary of Defence Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster), even resembles Thiel in appearance.

Back on Earth, Elysium is a dream for the desperate multitudes, not least because of the existence there of incubation technology that will cure all ills. Julio, a Mexican people-trafficker (Diego Luna) runs regular excursions up, but most are intercepted with extreme prejudice by Elysian defence forces. One particular destruction of two vessels containing hopeful emigrants is disturbing for the insouciance with which Blomkamp films it, which is the first time you begin to question the sincerity of the film’s political line. Max da Costa (Matt Damon), a former car thief out on parole, is one of Carlyle’s employees and he is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation that leaves him only five days to get to Elysium for the all-important medical treatment. To pay his way, he takes on a job with Julio where he will hi-jack Carlyle’s pod on the way to Elysium and steal valuable data. Little do either Julio or Max know that the encrypted data is intended to override Elysium’s operating system and allow Delacourt seize power. Meanwhile, Frey (Alice Braga), an orphanage friend of Max, needs to get to Elysium to get her daughter cured of her terminal leukaemia.

Delacourt has set vicious mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley, from District 9) on Max to retrieve the data. Kruger is the best thing by far in the film, a monstrous apocalyptic colossus who is at once absurd and terrifying. He also turns out to be highly volatile and untrustworthy. Foster as Delacourt is where Elysium goes badly wrong. Though I have always thought her an overrated actor, it is surprising how awful Jodie Foster is in this role, a bizarre amalgam of Christine Lagarde and Donald Rumsfeld. It’s all shoulder pads and cold stares and not the stuff of formidable villains. The denouement of Elysium is routine stuff and, like with District 9 before it, Blomkamp has by then long dispensed with any effort at political analogy or serious social commentary. Still, it is enjoyable enough and is thankfully devoid of the pretentiousness which is such a common feature of such films. A diverting two hours.

Promised Land – Gus Van Sant

Promised Land (Gus Van Sant – USA/United Arab Emirates) 106 minutes

For a good director, Gus Van Sant has made quite a few bad films in his time; nonetheless, all his films, from the resolutely commercial (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) to the experimental (Gerry, his frame-by-frame Psycho remake), both bad and good, are recognisably his. Each one bears the indelible stamp of a Gus Van Sant film. Van Sant’s last, the teenage cancer drama Restless, a tiresome stew of sentimentalism and quirkiness, brought to an end a run of excellent films but he was always likely to bounce back before too long.

Promised Land sees him return to the political activist genre that he first touched on in Milk, though this time the setting – rural Pennsylvania – is not so obvious for one of his films. It also reunites him with Matt Damon, who wrote and acted in the two films that represent the extremes of Van Sant’s work, Good Will Hunting and Gerry. Damon also contributes the screenplay here (based on an idea by Dave Eggers) and produces along with John Krasinski (who also stars, as the environmentalist activist Dustin Noble). The resulting film is a surprisingly robust if flawed drama about moral scruples and the strains of professional life.

Damon is Steve Butler, a young salesman for energy giant Global, who is a dab hand at convincing struggling farming communities to sell up their land for oil exploration (using the now notorious hydraulic fracturing method). When about to be promoted to an executive position at the beginning of the film, he explains his secret as being able to empathise with his prey, coming as he does from a similar rural background. Arriving in a small town with his sales partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDorman) however, he comes up against unexpected resistance, in the form of a science teacher and retired aviation engineer played by Hal Holbrook. Holbrook is then approached by Dustin Noble, an unknown environmental activist who is every bit Butler’s match, using fair means and foul to turn the townspeople against the buy-out bid.

The film is quite good early on in setting up the debate on fracking, and Butler is an impressively delineated figure of moral ambiguity. Krasinski is a rather alarmingly friendly idealist who resists corruption by his corporate adversaries while not being above delivering a few underhanded blows himself. The problem is the film does not really convince in the depiction of the community turning against the fracking. Their reaction is far too pavlovian and the implication is the townspeople are far too dim-witted to be capable of making an informed decision on their own. Butler’s efforts to win them over with a cattle fair is also a little crude and it betrays Damon and Krasinski’s origins as city boys. Even the roughest yokel is more sophisticated than that.

Ultimately Promised Land (a nifty title which infers something very different from its Biblical connotation) is a political sports movie like Milk but there is no clear-cut victory for anyone (the film, unlike many of this sort, is not based on any particular real-life case). Damon, a limited but efficient actor, is good in a role in which we find an echo of his younger Will Hunting (McDormand’s Sue is similarly cut from the same cloth as her Marge Gunderson in Fargo). Not surprisingly, Promised Land has been the target of public relations campaigns on behalf of fracking companies. I wonder if anyone pointed out the dubiousness of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates providing financial backing for the film, something that gives the film a strange additional flavour?