A home coming queen desperately seeking tolerance
The over-arching themes of Trudie Styler’s debut feature, Freak Show (12A) ★★★, are tolerance, inclusion and acceptance, and they’re pretty much impossible to argue with. The manner in which these themes are explored, however, is more debatable, with a distinct air of artifice, at times giving way to something approaching smugness and complacency, hanging in the air.
Actor Alex Lawther – best known for playing the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game – is Billy Bloom, a distinctly unorthodox American teenager whose love of cross-dressing and outrageous make-up earns him few friends when he is forced to live with his remote father and start a new high school as the mother he adores (Bette Midler) goes into rehab.
There are definite echoes of Quentin Crisp to what ensues, with Billy refusing to compromise and paying the inevitably violent price. But his defiance and selfconfidence do earn him admirers, so when he decides to run for homecoming queen (he’s pro-glamour, pageantry and good hair), the outcome is far from clear.
In The Fade (16) ★★★ is a harrowing German drama with Diane Kruger as a young woman whose immigrant husband and young son are blown up by a terrorist bomb.
Directed by the Turkish film-maker Fatih Akin, it’s a tough old watch, partly because of the subject matter, of course, but partly because the second act becomes badly bogged down in the German legal system, while the third is, well… just a bit odd.
But Kruger, returning to her native Germany presumably to show she’s more than just a pretty Hollywood face, is quite magnificent, and deservedly won the Best Actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Worth seeing for her alone.