"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again." Bruce Weber, the photographer-turned-director, loses it many times over in this scrapbook of lovers and love objects, past and present, platonic and iconic.
It opens with a Brazilian ju-jitsu champ; hip-hops over to Frances Faye, chanteuse and gay mascot, in full wail; embarks on a cultural tour of the famous people who've exposed themselves - in the buff, usually - to his lens. It's a homoerotic tour, with lots of bare-bottomed Adonises with half-closed eyes, dreaming of their own beauty, nostalgically intercut with clips of Diana Vreeland, Vogue's queen-empress, pontificating in her kitschy Park Avenue apartment; a grizzled and cynical Robert Mitchum singin' the blues with Dr John ("Not too Jewish, is it?"); English explorer Wilfred Thesiger's pursuit of the Bedouins; and plenty more to subvert the dictum of the fashion editor Lis Tilberis that "the best fashion photography springs from the heart". Here it springs from the genitals.
There's a lot to fascinate, whatever your sexual preference; also a lot to generate sadness. So many of Weber's inamorata are deceased, it's a little like looking into a glamorous graveyard. Even the memorial inscriptions are faded. "Who's Thelma Ritter?" asks one of Weber's boyfriends, leafing through the photographer's album; "Ava Gardner - do you know who she is?"
Susan Sontag, wrong on many things, was right to consider a photograph to be a kind of death certificate. Chop Suey is a memento mori, masquerading as a valentine.
Chop Suey
Cert: 15
