Swan Song

Brilliant and highly underrated!

This film is a MUST SEE item that is both hilarious as well as inspirational. A much loved hair dresser goes out with a "bang" after making a glorious final statement....

The movie vacillates between overly sentimental and genuinely moving. Udo Kier is delightful here and most of the really moving stuff is the result of his performance.

Off-beat, quirky, incredible acting by Uno Kier. A great lesson in staying true to yourself regardless of your age. With the smallest gesture or expression, Kier conveys what he was like in his younger years. I absolutely loved this movie.

Good movie to watch once.

This is a beautiful (true) story. Mr. Pat's craft was a joy to observe, and his observations (forward and in reverse) a joy to behold. The highs and the lows of a person, a place, and a phenomenon were brilliantly depicted and easily engaged. The homecoming journey was compelling and in perfect time and rhythm, as if his reflections and discoveries belonged to the viewer. By its crescendo, my heart was bursting with love for the real-life purveyor of same. And at the last call, the profound sadness and awareness of a visceral loss of genuine light.

Udo Kier is great and there are some enjoyable moments but this is a bit mawkish for my taste

Beautiful inter generational Gay story. Colorful characters, love, being true to oneself.

I really enjoyed a previous film Todd Stephens wrote called "Edge of Seventeen" which had the same Midwestern setting as this one, which made me want to see "Swan Song". This is a much slower film which deals with small town life from the point of view of a retired hairdresser, Pat, living in a retirement home. After one of his wealthy clients who he had a falling out with a long time ago passes away and instructs her executor to engage Pat to do her hair one more time, he makes his way out of the retirement home and across Sandusky Ohio and his lifetime of memories, friends, and frenemies, to the funeral home, for one last job. I suppose Hollywood has accustomed us to follow the lives of the young and active, which may make this seem like a bit of a slog, and it did feel that way, but there was an emotional pay off in the end that made it worth it.

Writer-director Todd Stephens' no-frills indie film is, according to its opening titles, inspired by a true icon, a flamboyant gay hairdresser (as if there's any other kind in reality) called Pat Pitsenbarger who did wealthy ladies' hair in Sandusky, Ohio. If the poster had you thinking Terence Stamp, that's actually Udo Kier, a face familiar to fans of action B-movies as he's often cast as the Euro heavy. With his German accent intact, and a delivery style that's part menacing, part disdain, and all defensive mechanism, his Pitsenbarger is a bitter man who's out of place and out of time (in both sense of the phrase), having lived a life as a gay man during a very different and more conservative time than the present day. Now residing in a mundane retirement home with his grey sweatpants, the death of Linda Evans' local socialite and ex-client who specifies Pitsenbarger in her will to do her hair and make-up kickstarts a road movie, mostly on foot, of self rediscoveries, where old haunts are revisited as he gathers what he needs for the job. It's a simple yet perfectly workable narrative mechanism to hang little glimpses of his life story on, about the love of his life or his rivalry with Jennifer Coolidge's mentee-turned-competitor, but it can also be clunky at times. The film is kitsch and fairly niche, just like its subject matter, and Stephens' dreamy indie tendencies can get in the way, producing some less than smooth editing that at times look like there's a scene missing here and there. If you can get over this, this works best as a melancholic exploration of ageing, loneliness and regrets especially in the context of someone who has lost his sparkle after outliving everyone else he holds dear around him.