“But hey, what about that? Can you tell what they are doing? Are they daddies with their children?” asks an old gay hairdresser who recently escaped from the asylum where he lives locked up. He is sitting on a bench facing the sea in the company of a dead friend —one of those ghosts that haunt intimacy and memory even after leaving— while he watches a couple of men play with their children on the beach. The old man wears an apple green suit (acid), wears a purple Panama hat and wears large rings studded with false precious stones. “I think I have forgotten how to be gay,” he concludes, moved by an image that he could not even imagine in his youth. He says it and his icy gaze is about to melt, as if in that very moment he misses his entire life: what was good and also everything that hurt. Perhaps that is a true look of old age and it is certainly beautiful. Of course, the one who looks like this is the legendary actor Udo Kier, a fetish sidekick for directors like Gus van Sant, Lars von Trier or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. And he does it in his debut as a leading actor at the age of 75. The result is a sublime interpretation, as well as a decalogue for untamed old age.
There are things in this life that we cannot do when we are young, or mature, or even old. Some things, few, we can only do if we grow old. And maybe one of them is revolution, radical dissidence, total denial. At least that is what Udo Kier has come to show us in “Song Swan” (Filmin). The film directed by Todd Stephens —and which has had distribution problems in Spain— is an affirmation of identity in the most difficult moment of life: that of isolation and oblivion that sometimes implies old age and that precedes death . Celebrating life at a time like this, finding meaning and not submitting to the pressure of institutions is the task of heroes. Perhaps that is why the protagonist of this proposal is an elderly gay hairdresser, proud of being one (like Udo himself), someone who has known stigma and social invisibility long before reaching old age, a man capable of affirming his body and his desire in the most adverse circumstances. In fact, the film pays tribute to all homosexual people who had to live their sexuality in societies more intolerant than ours. But at the same time it denounces a new form of stigma and intolerance: the one suffered by millions of people for the mere fact of reaching old age, “condemned” to live complying with rules that others decided for them, conventions that perhaps it is time to tear down. Being old is becoming a new and unjustifiable form of exclusion.
Fortunately, Pat Pitsenbarger —the hairdresser played by Udo Kier— knows well that identity is not only built with others but also, when necessary, against them. He, like him, knows that freedom is never negotiated. And much less when they take it away from you. Sometimes you have to be made of iron to be old, but our hero is a warrior, he is not afraid of anything and, like so many elders, he has lost everything. He doesn’t have a house or love or money or age to work. His partner died of AIDS and they did not recognize his right to the inheritance of his former home. So he is one of those older people who lives in a residence against his lucid will. His health is failing, the end is near, and yet his head is in perfect condition. Perhaps for this reason, the worst thing about living in this new form of social isolation is that they prohibit smoking. Precisely now that he does not care about dying, they punish him without his most precious vice. He can take other drugs, a lot of pills that are offered to him daily, but never again his favorite. No tobacco or alcohol until death. Who has decided such a thing? With what law? Why should he accept such a standard? These are questions that he throws at us all and that force us to consider managing the desires and will of the elderly. The management, perhaps, of our future desires and limitations.
Because it turns out that the reason he has to abide by standards no other adult is required to do is none other than his age and his health, for which he is no longer responsible for a reason no nurse is willing to explain. Thus, submission and depression seem to be the only way out. However, our indomitable Pat, trained to live outside the norm, secretly smokes devotedly. That anodyne and condemned gesture, that desire for life and death in each puff is the last victory of those who have understood that freedom is not a gift but a conquest. And so on until the happy day arrives when our hairdresser decides to get out of the asylum with what he is wearing for a reason that goes beyond the issue of tobacco. It happens that an old client asks him to do her makeup in one last public act: her funeral. The woman has left written how she wants to look in her box: genius, figure and a bouffant to match seem to be the premises. The burial is thus presented as a new affirmation of the will, as a personal farewell to one’s own body that can be meditated and cared for, as well as one last chance to be beautiful.
I don’t do them spoilers if I tell you that our protagonist, like all of us, walks straight to death. However, what is valuable about Udo Kier is that he shows us how to make the journey, how to go through life without censorship, without kneeling before social pressure and arbitrary impositions, full of desires and contradictions, full of life (and will) after all. Until the end. It should not be easy and apparently, only those who arrive well trained can do it. Definitely, to enjoy a free old age you have to start rebelling while still young.
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