Movie Review : Swan Song (2021)
I’ve had the same barber for thirteen years. It’s almost as long as I’ve been dating Josie. Matter of fact, I like how he cuts my hair so much that I’ve physically moved further away from his salon twice and I’m still his client. Because Ron gives a shit how I look. Our relationship it both 100% transactional and 100% personal. It is the great paradox of not doing things solely for money in a capitalist world. You get to love people in extremely narrow circumstances.
Todd Sephens’ film Swan Song is about a retired barber, but it’s also about how to exist in the twenty-first century outside the sacred bonds of blood, love or digital feedback loops.
Swan Song tells the story of Pat Pitsenbarger (Udo Kier), a flamboyant, Liberace-like hairdresser wasting away in a Texas retirement home after suffering from a debilitating stroke. When the lawyer of his best client visits him to announce 1) her passing and 2) notice him of her last request that he’d make her hair for the funeral, Pat undergoes one last great journey across town to do what he does best: make the world a little more beautiful, one head at a time.
Who You Are vs What You Do
The mere premise of this movie is going to turn a lot of people away. Because no one wants to think about old age. The fate our elderly suffer in retirement homes is terrifying in its best circumstances and downright nauseating whenever illness or shitty relatives get involved. Our protagonist Mr. Pat doesn’t have it all that bad since he’s gay and apparently doesn’t have any family left since his lover David died from AIDS in 1995. Still, it raised interesting questions.
Although Pat feels largely forgotten, people who crossed his path never did. There’s a beautiful scene where a thrift store employee recalls how Pat made her feel more beautiful than even her own husband decades ago confirms that although Pat almost solely existed through his commerce, that he didn’t exist in a transactional vortex. People loved what he made them feel about themselves, so they loved him for it. The value of his work wasn’t only financial.
There is something fucking beautiful and life-affirming about the idea that you can change people’s lives, make the world a better place and get paid doing what you do. Even better, be remembered. You might be too young to fully understand this: the older you get, the more important it is to leave people with a good memory of you. The older you get, the memory of you will be growing more important to others while the importance of the real you will dwindle.
Swan Song embraces the brutality of aging with great wit and compassion, though a character who aged really well despite the adversity he faced.
Flattened perspective
That said, Swan Swong isn’t a visually stunning (or even quirky) movie by any means. It is told in a rather flat, deadpan way like Jim Jarmusch was doing in the eighties. The lack of cinematic sentimentality is counterbalanced by a strong script and a career-redefining Udo Kier performance, but a thematically similar movie like Michael Sarnoski’s Pig showed it was possible to enhance the audience’s experience in a subdued way, without manipulating them.
Todd Stephens communicates Pat’s psychological and emotional rebirth through ingenious means like a change of clothes and one last night out, but I feel like a little more grandeur in the filmmaking approach would’ve fitted the character better. A little more lusciousness if you will. Because Swan Song is a dramedy with the visual flare of a Kevin Smith movie, which I believe betrays the gorgeousness of Pat’s inner journey towards rebirth.
*
I really liked Swan Song. It made me feel a little less alone and a little less dumb for living in a consumerist world and not being able to change shit about it. There is probably an entire layer of meaning that I missed about being old and gay but I’m here to tell you that you can thoroughly enjoy Swan Song without being well-informed about LGBTQ issues and the elderly. That it won’t make you a worse person if you miss it too. It only means you’re watching a solid movie.
