Had the absolute pleasure of going along to the Pictureville cinema here in Bradford this weekend to watch Victor/Victoria (1982, dir. Blake Edwards) as part of their Widescreen Weekend film festival.
It was on my radar for a while, but I’d never gotten around to watching it, and when some friends of mine were going along I booked my ticket to go along with.
Victor/Victoria is a remake of the 1933 Viktor und Viktoria — I knew it was widely acclaimed, but it was such an absolute delight, it really was so much better than I even anticipated.
It’s a rom-com that starts with a simple premise: Victoria Grant (Julie Andrews) is a down-on-her-luck soprano trying to find a job in Paris in 1934. She’s utterly starving after failing out on an audition in a gay club, Chez Lui, and crosses paths with Toddy (Robert Preston), who’s just been fired from the same establishment. As she’s tossing Toddy’s no-good boyfriend out on his arse, Toddy is struck with a genius notion: they’ll put Victoria in drag and have her play as a man… in a drag act.
A woman playing a man playing a woman… What could be more perfect?
From the out, this is a film that is so rich with queer jokes and banter — Chez Lui is seedy and nasty and also completely status-obsessed in a way that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever been in that sort of club, especially watching performers try to one-up one another.
The way that Toddy and Victoria are with each other and the immediate way they’re so at-ease and so familiar, even fraternal, with each other, is so wonderful, and as Toddy starts coaching Victoria on how to take on the Victor persona, and then once they’re playing at being boyfriends, it feels so real and so genuine and so easy.
They’re physically affectionate with each other, they have so many in-jokes and regular bits of banter that recur and come up again and again, the way they call each other out, compliment one another, comfort one another. Multiple times, you see Victoria drop her head onto Toddy’s chest and just have a cry as he holds her, and it’s so lovely.
There’s so much excellent slapstick and physical comedy in this film, but that’s not at all to say that the script doesn’t put in the effort — there are so many sharp and incisive and clever pieces of banter, so much tremendous rhythm in the way people talk with and snipe at one another, and it’s all so real and so believable, too.
The music is excellent, the choreography is so fun, there’s so much beauty in the film — beauty in the nuances to the way that people see each other and talk to each other, in the way people speak frankly or use coded language with each other.
Part of the reason this film was selected for the Widescreen Weekend was because it makes such excellent use of its widescreen aspect ratio — you get to see so much of the audience responding to individual performances, you get to enjoy so much of the carefully established and decorated mise-en-scene, background characters, dancers, and so forth.
I will say, the costuming in this film is just sublime. I would be hard-pressed to pick an outfit I wouldn’t happily walk away wearing — I laughed a bit in the cinema when the matador dancers initially came on screen, because I already effectively own that outfit.
Robert Preston as Toddy was phenomenal, he’s such a lovable and roguish bitchy gay man, and he comes off as so true-to-life — his romance with Squash was wholly unexpected for me, I didn’t see realise it was coming, and I really loved it, as well as Squash’s character as a whole and the layers to his queerness and just how touched he is when Toddy reaches out to him and shows affection for him.
James Garner as King Marchand gave an excellent performance — the number of times the camera settled on him doing agonised bisexual maths in his head and just sat there as the seconds ticked past was so, so good, and so incredibly funny.
But honestly?
Lesley Ann Warren absolutely stole the show as Norma Cassidy. It was so fun seeing her as this absurd and over-the-top and utterly obnoxious woman who is genuinely really awful, but so incredibly lovable at the same time. The bit where she’s resisting Victor and then whispers for him to lock the door is so incredibly funny — she’s selfish, she’s hedonistic, she’s jealous, she’s incredibly violent, she’s just the perfect woman, and I loved her to absolute pieces whenever she was on screen.
And yeah, so many other moments in this film stand out as particularly delightful or making me excited about rewatching it already — the background people in drag or just being cheerfully transgender and fun with their clothes, the butches and the fruits in their gladrags; so much of the choreography, but especially the dances in Chez Lui with the masks on the back of the heads and the feminine clothes on one side with the tuxes on the other; King Marchand exercising his masculinity by getting in a bar fight before immediately getting all these men to sing with him; everything Norma does; and of course, Toddy’s final performance as Victoria and how much joy there is in that scene, where everyone is in stitches in the audience but also on stage, because they know the choreography but he’s obviously just not the same performer Victoria is.
I absolutely understand why so many people watch this movie and then immediately have it jump onto their list of all-time favourites, because I feel much the same way.
It’s just such a surprisingly cosy film, you know?
There are so many elements of genuine queer domesticity in the flop and in the hotel rooms and backstage and everywhere else, and there’s just so much joy in this film.
Unlike with Yentl (1983), I don’t know that Victoria feels as much of a trans or genuinely gender-fluid character to me — her desire for the benefits of masculinity and her joy in the layered drag performances absolutely feel real and genuine, but Yentl feels like a very transmasculine movie, as I’ve written about before, and I don’t know that I feel that way about Victor/Victoria. I think that it compares better with Tootsie (1982), in that it’s a very human exploration where you see the MC experience a lot of things that are normally out of reach for them when they’re not in dag, both positive and negative, and that includes a wider gamut of emotions and their own identity.
Nonetheless, it absolutely feels like a very richly queer film with so much love for queerness and gender play in all kinds of ways, and I can’t wait to rewatch it again and again with new friends and old.
Leave a Reply