2008 Woodie Awards
Play-turned-film has style, heart
By: Anthony Barsanti
Issue date: 9/27/07 Section: Lifestyle
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Originality is often hard to come by, but when John Cameron Mitchell's first film premiered in 2001, it was there for all to see, whether they liked it or not. "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," originally a hit off-Broadway play, morphed into celluloid form and issued a musical message of a sexually androgynous yet revealing nature - areas not comfortably traversed in Hollywood.
What is so endearing about the film is the deeply personal level on which the audience is allowed to see the characters, especially Hedwig herself. Mitchell and musician Stephen Trask wrote the original story and music back in 1994; since then, the tale has evolved into something more than that of a mysterious drag queen - a quest for love.
Based on many personal experiences of Mitchell, Hedwig, who grew up in claustrophobic East Berlin, was once a boy who was enchanted by the messages of freedom he heard over American Forces Radio from the likes of Lou Reed and David Bowie.
Desperate to see life beyond the Berlin Wall, he eventually falls for a U.S. Army soldier and gets a sex-change operation to make for a legal marriage. The procedure is a disaster and she is left with an inch-long mound of flesh where her vagina should be. Sexually confused and vulnerable, she ends up in a Junction City, Kan., trailer park with nothing. But she soon remembers the music that first inspired her and meets Tommy, a shy boy with unexplored musical talents.
The storyline seems odd and confusing at first, but the plot tends not to be the focus of such an entertaining film. It is heavily infused with punk rock semi-music video/flashbacks to expose not only how this situation came to pass, but also what it all really means.
In the tradition of possibly the first film to cover similar topics of sexual ambiguity, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," (1975) "Hedwig" swims without restraint within a musical comedy/rock opera context of the 1970s glam rock culture. Even when bearing the stigma of a counter-culture raison d'etre (there is a resilient cult following), the film still has made a considerable amount of dough.
What is so endearing about the film is the deeply personal level on which the audience is allowed to see the characters, especially Hedwig herself. Mitchell and musician Stephen Trask wrote the original story and music back in 1994; since then, the tale has evolved into something more than that of a mysterious drag queen - a quest for love.
Based on many personal experiences of Mitchell, Hedwig, who grew up in claustrophobic East Berlin, was once a boy who was enchanted by the messages of freedom he heard over American Forces Radio from the likes of Lou Reed and David Bowie.
Desperate to see life beyond the Berlin Wall, he eventually falls for a U.S. Army soldier and gets a sex-change operation to make for a legal marriage. The procedure is a disaster and she is left with an inch-long mound of flesh where her vagina should be. Sexually confused and vulnerable, she ends up in a Junction City, Kan., trailer park with nothing. But she soon remembers the music that first inspired her and meets Tommy, a shy boy with unexplored musical talents.
The storyline seems odd and confusing at first, but the plot tends not to be the focus of such an entertaining film. It is heavily infused with punk rock semi-music video/flashbacks to expose not only how this situation came to pass, but also what it all really means.
In the tradition of possibly the first film to cover similar topics of sexual ambiguity, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," (1975) "Hedwig" swims without restraint within a musical comedy/rock opera context of the 1970s glam rock culture. Even when bearing the stigma of a counter-culture raison d'etre (there is a resilient cult following), the film still has made a considerable amount of dough.
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