Victor/Victoria (1982)
Based on a 1933 German film by Rheinhold Schuenzel called Viktor
und Viktoria, this bloated farce cashes in on the transvestite
popularity of La Cage aux Folies by dressing Julie Andrews
in drag and trying desperately to milk some laughs out of stylised
homosexuality.
There is something decidedly unattractive about Julie Andrews
in drag (she looks neither male nor female, merely androgynous and
sickly pale), as she plays a starving opera singer in 1934 Paris
who is so hungry, she offers her body to the landlord for a
meatball.
Robert Preston plays an aging drag queen who has just been
fired from his job at a gay cabaret, called Chez Lui, for
insulting the customers and causing a riot.
The pair meet in the rain, cheat a café out of dinner by
pretending there are cockroaches in the food, and become friends,
roommates, and business partners, in a fraudulent scheme to pass
Mary Poppins off as a Polish count who sings and dances as a
woman.
Dressed in Preston's old lover's clothes, she becomes the
transvestite rage of Paris, looking like a grotesque Berlin
cartoon from the Nazi era.
Enter James Garner, a Chicago gangster so shocked at his
attraction to a man that he goes out and beats up a few waterfront
toughs. What a mess - a swarm of clichés masquerading as comic
perversion.
Andrews is a woman pretending to be a man who is impersonating
a woman. Garner, playing his own stereotype, is a Neanderthal who
has to keep proving his manhood with violence to cover the truth
that he's a macho man in love with a female impersonator, who is
really a woman.
Preston is a man who really wants to be a woman. To complicate
things further, there is Garner's peroxide tramp of a girlfriend
(Lesley Ann Warren) who thinks she can turn a gay man straight,
and Garner's burly bodyguard (Alex Karras) who falls in love with
Preston.
The boys find they enjoy being girls, the girls find they enjoy
being boys, and one expects a chorus from Rodgers and Hammerstein
at any moment. Instead, we get abominable musical numbers by Henry
Mancini and Leslie Bricusse, with chorus boys in boy-girl masks
dripping with sequins and mascara, women impersonating men, men
impersonating women, and not a shred of conviction from anybody.
Heavy-handed direction and bone-headed performances don't help,
and there's no comic tension. Garner wears more makeup than
Andrews, so the confusion is heightened beyond all intentions and
for all the wrong reasons.
The art deco bedroom Preston and Andrews share as platonic
friends drowns in homosexual interior decorating, while Garner's
room chokes on its own sterility. (Both in the same hotel? It's as
though the manager looked over the reservation list and shrieked:
"The queens are coming; get out the pink satin
sheets!").
Every gender joke imaginable gushes forth, but there are few
genuine laughs. The only real comic moment comes when Andrews
moans about strapping her bosom to look flat-chested in a man's
suit . . . What bosom?!
Poor Preston is relegated to bitch lines that must have been
amusing to Edwards when he wrote them. "There's nothing more
inconvenient than an old queen with a head cold," says
Preston, and the line is not only unfunny, it doesn't even make
sense. It's all very trashy and offensive, not to mention
sophomoric.
The best that can be said of Victor/Victoria is that it
is an improvement over S.O.B. - but that is not meant as an
endorsement.
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