Film
UNIQUE. LOCAL. ORIGINAL.
Kaijus & Udo
Udo Kier sings his “Swan Song” and the low-brow “Suicide Squad” is high art By Br yan VanC ampe n
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I
think the first time I saw Udo Kier was in the Wesley Snipes Marvel vampire picture “Blade” (1998), but to be honest, I’d seen pictures of him in “Sex in the Cinema” articles in my dad’s Playboy magazines. Kier made his film debut in 1965, and now he’s got over 200 film credits on his resume. In Todd Stephens’ “Swan Song” (Magnolia Pictures-Luna Pictures-House of Gemini”, 2021, 105 min.), opening at Cinemapolis on Aug. 13, Kier gives a spiky and funny performance as Pat Pitsenbarger, a retired hairdresser living in an old-age home in Sandusky, Ohio. He doesn’t speak for the first 10 minutes of the movie. He talks when a visiting lawyer tells him that a deceased former client wanted Pat to style her final hairdo. The death-bed request awakens something in Pat, and so he escapes his care-facility to wander around Sandusky, looking for the right supplies for the job.
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This is one of those twilight, elegiac performances; Kier is clearly nearer to the end than the beginning, and there’s so much emotional subtext that Kier brings simply by who he is and his theatrical persona. Todd Stephens shoots everything in flat verité, like a straightforward documentary: “Udo Visits Sandusky.” To see him go from illicitly smoking and reclining like a living corpse at home to receiving the gift of a jaunty, pink woman’s hat from the hair stylists working at his former beauty supply place and playing jump rope with a bunch of kids in a vacant lot, is one of those small but human victories. “Swan Song” would make a nice double-bill with Paul Masurzky’s 1974 “Harry and Tonto,” starring Art Carney as an old man embarking on his last road trip, or “Bubba Ho-Tep” (2003), a redemptive mummy picture starring Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as JFK (Yes, JFK).
