THE HIGHLIGHTS REEL
In ‘Swan Song’ a familiar face steps onto centre stage, writes Tymon Smith
For over five decades the German actor Udo Kier has been a familiar face in a multi-genre collection of more than 220 films. He has been directed by people as diverse as his childhood friend, the German New Wave genius Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andy Warhol’s Factory film director Paul Morrisey, Italian horror master Dario Argento and Danish pioneer Lars von Trier.
Anyone who has seen Kier emerging fully formed from the birth canal of a woman in Von Trier’s ’90s television masterpiece The Kingdom or howling with bloodlust in Morrisey’s Blood for Dracula will certainly find the actor hard to forget.
Yet in spite of his prolific, workhorse career, the now 77-year-old Kier has for some inexplicable reason never been the solo star of a film — until now. In director Todd Stephens’ small but heartfelt dramedy Swan Song, Kier plays Pat Pisenbarger, an ageing, camp hairdresser who is seeing out his not-so-golden years in a state retirement home, where he shuffles the halls in his unglamorous track suit, sneaking illicit cigarillos and maniacally refolding paper napkins.
Pat is visited by the lawyer of one of his best and wealthiest former clients, Rita Parker Sloan (Linda Evans), who tells him she has died and that her will states that her hair for her funeral should be done by him. Initially reluctant to take on the job, Pat eventually breaks out of his retirement home and sets off on a journey that will offer him one last chance to come to terms with his past and do the right thing for his departed friend.
Under the constant gaze of the camera Kier creates a humane, layered portrait of Pat as a sometimes sad fading old duck who is kept going by his memories of his days as the town’s benevolent swan, working his hair magic.
Stephens’ direction works adequately when his camera is just watching and letting Kier do his thing, but it stumbles
‘Swan Song’ is on Showmax when the film — through an unnecessary conceit that literalises the idea of facing up to the ghosts of the past — slips into cringey, mawkish sentimentality.
Overall, though, Swan Song works as a small, empathetically realised human drama that’s carried by the excellent performance of a lead actor who has spent far too many decades standing in the shadows.