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John Cameron Mitchell, USA, 2001
According to the bottom line of John Cameron Mitchell's id-rock anti-spectacular Hedwig and the Angry Inch, there is no whole - just a hole. The yang never finds its yin, Adam never gets his Eve, and the theme song might be "You Incomplete Me." This isn't to say that writer-director-star-chanteuse Mitchell doesn't achieve erotic fusion. While the eponymous East Berlin-born transsexual plays the dinner theaters of America with her rock band, searching for psycho-spiritual balm, the film attempts to harmonize movie, musical, and music-video stylings. Playing like a wedding song to the union of those three modes - in the most bizarre and achy-- breaky exploitation of the rock idiom since maybe Phantom of the Paradise -- Hedwig is a formal dare attempted in the name of exposing its titular headcase's frayed edges.
Suspended somewhere between rock opera and the eye-popping stuff you can find on MTV2 at 3 Hedwig looks like the brew Roeg, Fassbinder, and Spike Jonze might concoct together -- a mossy, semi-tragic fun house with a drunken camera trying not to pass out. But Hedwig goes deeper under the Wig than Jonze would, and at...