VELVET GOLDMINE (55)

Directed by: Todd Haynes

Starring: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ewan McGregor, Toni Collette, Christian Bale

The Pitch: The rise and fall of 70s "glam rock", as refracted through the career of a Bowie-like performer.

Theo Sez: Mileage will vary here : I lasted about an hour - a thrilling, oneiric hour - before tuning out, never to return. Oscar Wilde appears in the prologue, and his combination of stylisation and playfulness - even more than his symbolic value as the ultimate sexual outcast - is what drives the movie, which is actually a lot more amused and self-deprecating than the music it depicts, the kind of film that cheerfully throws in cartoon effects like dollar-signs in people's eyes, or plays the whole three minutes of "Virginia Plain" over a scene just for the little joke at the end ("What's your name?" a character is asked, just as Ferry and Co. get to "What's her name? Virginia Plain"!). "The first duty in Life," it's affirmed, "is to assume a pose", and the film duly goes for a self-consciously vibrant artificiality, down to the performances (Collette apparently channelling Liza Minnelli in CABARET) : the first 20 minutes or so - virtually dialogue-free, melding voice-over, TV commentators and whispering kids with the splendid early-70s soundtrack - are terrific, but diminishing returns rapidly set in, the film repeating its effects and revealing the hollowness behind its emphasis on elaborate glamour over characters (there are no characters - that's the point ; but there's still an hour to go after the point's been made). Haynes' vision is of fakery-as-Art (and vice versa), a dreamworld of fragmented lives, a rebellion against reality and its supporters ; it is, you might say, an "interesting metaphor" for the creative fakery required to survive when you're a 'deviant' in the world (an artist, or gay, or both) ; but then you look at the few scenes with a bit of life to them, those with a bit of ordinary humanity - the teenage Bale huddling in his room, revelling in the forbidden sounds of Slade, poring intently over his NME : glam as a living, breathing thing, his ticket out of his drab working-class existence - and interesting metaphors somehow start to seem monumentally pointless.