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Chop Suey

2001, Movie, NR, 98 mins

Chop Suey: Review

CHOP SUEY
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For better or worse, Bruce Weber is one of the more influential fashion photographers of our time. Refining a homoerotic aesthetic previously restricted to physique pictorials and beefcake magazines, Weber shifted the camera's focus away from the girl and onto boys who invariably represented an impossible ideal of male beauty. The photos he took for Calvin Klein and Vanity Fair are still being copied — often by Weber himself — and his fantasies of highly eroticized boyish innocence are still raising a ruckus from within the pages of the notoriously racy Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. Assembled by Weber himself and overflowing with bits and pieces of his life and loves, this ditty box of a movie is a little like Maximillian Schell's 1984 documentary MARLENE, about legendary movie icon Marlene Dietrich; it attempts a portrait of an artist who, aside from a few telling moments, is completely uninterested in self-revelation. Instead, it's about the people and things Weber loves, starting with the impossibly innocent teenage model Peter Johnson, whom Weber discovered at an Ohio wrestling camp. (The film's title alludes to an old-fashioned camera club Weber and his friends formed for the sole purpose of photographing Johnson in a variety of "artistic" poses and get-ups.) Weber takes Johnson on a virtual tour of his interests, starting with his mania for singer Frances Faye who, far more than Weber, is the film's real subject. Weber flips through monographs on his favorite photographers; discusses a few of his other subjects, including the Brazilian jujitsu champ Rickson Gracie and professional surfer Christian Fletcher; and reminisces about meeting famous English explorer Sir Wilfred Thesinger. Weber's obsessions are illustrated by wonderful film clips, from Faye on the Ed Sullivan show and Dusty Springfield on Top of the Pops to Diana Vreeland discussing her boredom with the "Mona Lisa" and Robert Mitchum in a recording studio, wondering if his rendition of "Sleepy Time Down South" sounds "too Jewish." Amid the clutter, Weber — who narrates but never appears in front of the camera — occasionally allows a glimpse into his own mind. Perhaps the most telling moment comes when he recalls his embarrassment in high-school gym class at having to undress before the corn-fed, Midwestern jocks he considered to be young gods. "We sometimes photograph things we can never be," he admits, and you couldn't ask for a more succinct précis of this artist's motivation. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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