Victor/Victoria: A boytoy movie review

[TotallyOz]

Victor/Victoria

Here we have a film that was unique for its time it was both very honest and open about gay lifestyles, and able to appeal to a straight audience. It is also one of the few films to manage to use gay stereotypes in a way that doesn't come off as homophobic or offensive. Instead, it strikes a near perfect balance between funny and charming.

The story behind Victor/Victoria is interesting as well. The director, Blake Edwards, had made a career out of the Pink Panther movie series. Then, his star Peter Sellers became too ill to continue to participate in the films. At the same time his wife, Julie Andrews, was shit tired of her image as America's Sweetheart earned from staring in both Mary Poppins and The Sound Of Music an image that she couldn't shake even though it had been years since those roles. She wanted a career as a grown-up adult woman who wasn't an eternal virgin.

Edwards's first attempt at solving this problem was to make a film called S.O.B., which had Andrews playing an actress cast in the most expensive children's musical ever made. However, when test screenings of the film go badly (in the film, not in real life), the studio convinces the director to reshoot and recut the film as the most expensive porno ever made, with the marketing hook being it would star the famous actress from children's movies.

That film featured Andrews topless, with mock fellatio and, essentially, let us watch Mary Poppins masturbate on screen.

In real life the studio wasn't really hip to that film though, and it got fairly limited distribution. So, Blake Edwards decided on another tack - to cast Andrews in Victor/Victoria, playing a woman pretending to be a gay man who pretends to be a woman.

By turning it into a farcical romantic comedy with James Garner as the love interest he was able to sell it, get wide distribution, and get Andrews out of her rut as perpetual on-screen virgin.

You know that you've been typecast, I guess, when you have to first play a porn star and then a drag queen in order to throw off your Susie Cream Cheese image.

The result is a film about Paris in the mid-1930s, when a starving Victoria can't manage to make it as a professional singer and is about to be evicted from her fleabag motel. She runs into an equally bloke, flamboyantly gay man, played perfectly by Robert Preston.

Between the two of them they realize that she'll never become a star as a woman, but could make a fortune playing the greatest drag queen in the history of Gay Paris. They concoct an elaborate and absurd backstory of Victor, an extremely effeminate gay Polish count with the voice of an angel.

Victoria, as Victor, becomes the toast of Paris. But complications arise when a Chicago mob boss, played by Garner, comes to a show one night and falls in love. Because he's so convinced of his straightness he can't believe that Victor is really a drag queen, and sets out to prove that Victor is really Victoria.

She falls in love with him as well, and hijinks ensue. Do they end up doing the dirty? Yes, but what's interesting is that they don't even kiss until Garner finally declares, I don't care if you are a man, I love you.

That said, he's not exactly upset when he finds out that Victor does have a vagina.

There are other revelations along the way, a myriad of sight gags and, of course, characters who suddenly come out of the closet when they think Garner is now banging Victor/Victoria (for involved plot reasons, Garner decides it's better if people think he's gay than find out the truth about Victoria).

It's all very well-meaning, often hilarious funny, and touching. The point of the film is that love is more important than gender, and there may not be that much difference really between gay and straight.

All this from what was supposed to be a vehicle to change his wife's on-screen image. (Though I suspect part of the metaphor is that Andrews was a sex kitten playing a virgin on screen for most of her career, which Edwards probably thought was not that different from a woman playing a gay man to advance her career.)

If anything, it's just as much making fun of Hollywood as S.O.B. was, but simply doing it in a way that was much more comfortable for both the studio and middle America.

Unfortunately, it didn't have that much of a long-term impact on Andrew's career, given that her latest efforts were Disney's Enchanted and she's currently filming Enchanted 2 proving that without her husband to cast her in his own films, people buy her as some fairy tale Disney confection more than as a sexually active woman (or gay man!).

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

cc boytoy.com 2013

[Guest lurkerspeaks]

Great movie, great review, but how could you not mention the fantastical performance by Leslie Ann Warren as the ditzy blond?

[Guest hitoallusa]

Oz wonderful review!