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Wrestler and model Peter Johnson is captured in a Weber picture |
Chop sticks to beauty of USA
CHOP SUEY
Directed by Bruce Weber
Certificate 15
PHOTOGRAPHER Bruce Weber has made his name for his striking fashion and advertising photography, and his ability to wield cameras as an artist painting classical portraits.
Chop Suey tells the story of a camera club he formed in the 1970s and of the various subjects he has shot during his 40-year career. It is all honed biceps, rippling stomach muscles and fantastic quiffs – naked wrestlers frolicking are intercut with grand vistas of the American Midwest, the hustle of New York streets and West Coast surf. Weber has chronicled the beautiful sides of both the geography and people of the United States.
But whether the case for this moving exhibition of his work is worth a feature-length film is debatable.
Deliciously self-indulgent, Weber’s over-long story just about gets away with it for three reasons: first, it is visually superb. Each shot is a masterpiece, incredibly set and lit. Second, the soundtrack trawls through some great back-catalogues of the likes of rocking pianist and Rat Pack contemporary, the sadly under-celebrated Frances Faye. Without the images in front of you, it would make a great album.
Third, the talking head interviews remind us of Ernest Hemingway’s 1920s Paris sketches, A Moveable Feast. As Hemingway wrote the book capturing the Left Bank in all its glory, Weber has caught on celluloid a real taste of 20th-century American culture.
Watching the hugely eccentric Diana Vreeland, the editor-in-chief of Vogue in the 1960s, gushing over how completely wonderful she finds skateboarding and the “blondey-blonde coat” of Weber’s dog, appears both comic and operatic. Typical Vreeland line: “I, and only I, have earned the right to die in an opium den in Hong Kong.”
Disjointed, odd and too long, it would make a brilliant TV documentary, except it would then lose its visual impact.
Caught between these stools, for fans of visual arts and fashion, it’s a winner. For the rest of us, it is like a tour through an art gallery: occasionally brilliant and an occasional bore. |
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