Pat Pitsenbarger (Udo Kier) lives in a retirement home now, in his twilight years, but time was in the past he was a big deal, for he was one of the best hairstylists around. Those days are gone, and now he spends his days sitting around in his comfy chair, folding napkins he steals from the canteen, and sneaking smokes of his favourite brand, despite having suffered a stroke a while ago. This has left him not physically too bad, but mentally he is starting to fog: all his memories are there, they just take a little while to surface once summoned. One day he is visited by a lawyer for one of his wealthy clients, someone he has not seen in ages.
She has passed away, and in her will she requested Pat arrange her hair and makeup as she lies in the coffin... Writer and director Todd Stephens essentially crafted a tribute to his leading man with the aptly named Swan Song (though Kier still had some films to be released, even in 2021 when this came out), so it was a showcase for the star's celebrated personality. But it was not a horror film, the genre he had become most famous for, not at all - though the finale did have a note of the macabre about it - it was a comedy drama that did not downplay his advancing years.
Rather it embraced them and made him the hero of a story that examined how much of yourself you can hold onto once you are elderly and submitting to the care home system. Pat has his own, aforementioned forms of rebellion and self-identity that he clings to, but the impression is he is starting to drift away. Kier approached this not with the sort of grumpy old man irascibility you might have anticipated, he barely raises his purr of a voice to anyone, yet as Pat fades from this world, he still has parts of it he wishes to grasp onto. Most obviously, his former partner, who he loved and lost to AIDS a couple of decades before, and this is the sticking point that means he is reluctant to take the lawyer's offer since the deceased and he fell out over the lover he misses terribly.
Nevertheless, he does have his reasons for escaping the facility and turning this into a road movie of sorts, for half of it anyway, and they are not all financial (he has been offered a large sum of money if he agrees to perform one last beauty treatment). However, precisely what is going on in his head is something of a mystery, and that lent his performance Kier's customary magnetism. Once in town, we learn he has another issue, as his former pupil (Jennifer Coolidge) many years back broke off from his salon and opened another across the street, taking some of his clients with her. It's a sore point, but he finds he has to confront her as the dead woman's favourite conditioner has been discontinued in favour of an environmentally friendly product.
And the former colleague is the only person in town who has a bottle of it. But there was more, as Pat takes this opportunity to tour his old haunts, such as his partner's grave, their old house (now flattened) and the gay bar they spent many happy evenings in, this last an excuse to get the star to camp it up and bust some dance moves. Although Stephens did not court sentimentality until the very end, and even then with a wink, if you were an Udo fan you owed it to yourself to check out this showcase to the great man's talents: he understood exactly what was required of him, was nothing less than engaging throughout, and he would make anyone who has enjoyed his work, or saw echoes of their own elderly family members or friends in Pat, a little misty-eyed. The soundtrack music consisted of well-chosen, gay-friendly oldies, of which you may observe describes Udo, too - this assuredly featured his best role in many years.
[SWAN SONG is released in UK cinemas 10th June 2022.]
