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HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
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Let's cut to the chase: German expatriate botched-post-op transsexual with heavy drag queen flourishes gamely searches for a sense of self by singing soulful auto-confessional hard-rock songs.
Are you gagging? Leave now.
Still here? There are reasons to see this cult-classic-in-the-making rock musical, even though five minutes in, you may wonder what they could possibly be.
Cast your mind back forty years. In 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, sundering two halves of a nation. (Actually, they were sundered 15 years earlier, but this is symbolic, okay?) In that same year was born, in East Berlin, Hansel Schmidt. From his childhood, little Hansel seeks love in his search for the missing other, the half of self from whom he believes we all were once sundered. In the monad, yin and yang are two identically shaped pieces, white and black, that fit together into a circle. On his hip he tattoos a jagged-edged monad, the S S strokes reminding him of two stick figures spooning, viewed from above.
Using a single character as a symbolic personification of a nation's evolution can be an effective novelistic device, as Gunter Grass did in THE TIN DRUM or Salman Rushdie showed in MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN. It works less well on film because each leap of time requires another actor (or the same actor wearing ever-more-rubbery makeup). But writer-director-star-auteur John Cameron Mitchell draws a strong thematic link. Just before the wall comes down young Hansel, desperate to escape East Berlin, is found by a black American sergeant sugar daddy (literally) who feeds him Gummie Bears, professes love, and offers to marry him and take him west -- if he makes the one teensy little sacrifice necessary to convince the East German authorities Hansel is really a girl named Hedwig.
The surgery is flubbed -- "six inches born," Hedwig sings, "five inches lost, one angry inch left." New-she relocates to a trailer under the power lines in Kansas City. Ouch! Sugar daddy finds a new boytoy, departs. Double ouch! Now, years later, she plays salad-bar restaurants (called Bilgewater's) to shocked, baffled diners as she chases redemption in the form of rock superstar Tommy Gnosis, whom she claims she taught everything he knows.
There is something horrifically fascinating about watching emotionally dazed Hedwig pick up the pieces. (One might think it a specialized area, but dignified jilted transsexuals holding themselves together features prominently in two other films, Fassbinder's YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS and the hilarious PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT.) In his extended metaphor of sundered-nation, sundered-souls, director-star Mitchell is on to something. His German accent is extraordinarily credible, delicately underplayed, his singing good, the music melodic (except for the occasional screamer), and the lyrics essential. They and the accompanying animation tell genuine stories. Though HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH never quite comes together, that is not for want of trying and if you have not left earlier you emerge, blinking, unsettled and thoughtful.
P. S. We saw the movie in Harvard Square, after a promo urging us to use Fandango so that we would not be sold out of movies we wanted to see ... shown to seven people (not counting the projectionist, whom I would not warrant was present).