Weber Thril

BRUCE WEBER TURNS THE CAMERA ON HIMSELF IN CHOP SUEY

HOT REELS

In photographer Bruce Weber’s deeply personal film Chop Suey, we are taken along on his journey from being an insecure kid whose determination never to be square led him to a lifelong adoration of tough-gal chanteuse Finances Faye (“my own Joplin,” Weber explains in a plaintive voice-over) to his current place as the kerchiefed pasha of homoeroticism—epitomized in his fascination with model Peter Johnson, who was discovered by Weber at a wrestling camp in Iowa. But Weber’s homoeroticism— if that is even the word that best describes the longing his lens so baldly displays—is based not on having his subjects but on being them. “We sometimes photograph things we can never be,” he says, pointing up the sad and sensual tension in so many of his images.

The remarkable collage of subjects in Chop Suey, masterfully edited by Angelo Corrao, include Faye’s reminiscing lover, the wrinkled and ravishing Teri Shepherd; surfer Christian Fletcher; British travel writer and aficionado of young Arabs Sir Wilfred Thesiger; jujitsu champion Rickson Grade; 70s pinup Jan Michael Vincent; and the redoubtable Diana Vreeland. Vreeland’s conversation with Henry Geldzahler, in which she mimics the sound of skateboarders outside her office window at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the more telling highlights of the film. A shudder passes through her (and lights her up as if, indeed, it has just opened an aperture to her aestheticism), and she marvels at the sweet audacity that youth and beauty enable one to display so effortlessly. It is a sweetness, an audacity, that Weber translates for the rest of us with his own ready shutter. (Rating: ★★★) KEVIN SESSUMS