Last night I witnessed something quite extraordinary - Oscar Wilde's masterful, urbane 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' reduced to something artless, woefully pretentious and, most miraculous of all, crashingly dull.
The promising opening 2 minutes very quickly evaporates like an unreliable memory as soon as the real business is introduced. Narrative is sketchy to say the least and even a knowledge of the novel is not enough to get you through 90 of the longest and most incoherent minutes I can remember.
The film is tolerably well acted and populated by very pretty people. There's a particularly well-judged performance by Christian Camargo. But it's as if the cast have as little sense of where the film is going as the director himself. Tone and pacing are clueless. I'm sure that the director believes that his film is a potent comment on empty, drug-fueled lives, but unfortunately there is nothing on screen that ever rises above the predicable and tedious.
With many of Wilde's most famous aphorisms picked out for our amusement, in this director's hands they fall flat like lead balloons. It's a completely humorless piece. One joke about Wagner raised a laugh, but the majority of the laughter was of the unintentional variety.
To add to the general unpleasant feel of the film was a scene near the end set in a crack den inhabited entirely by African American people - the only African American people in the film until this point. It's a long time since I've watched a race reduced to a stereotype as blatantly offensive and ignorant as this.
Just as offensive is the director's portrayal of AIDS - signaled by the word written in a title that fills the screen in giant letters in case we are too stupid to guess what's going on. Here AIDS is presented as nothing more than a bad case of acne. Seeing Dorian with a face full of spots does not quite present the horror you'd expect of the infamous portrait in the attic.
The director gives himself more credits than you could shake a stick at. There was a Mexican wave of laughter along my row when the director's ego enabled him to receive solo credits for production design and executive producer (now, that's desperate) above the title.
The film was shown as the closing night of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and watched by an audience who clearly didn't get it. As the end credits rolled there was an exodus of biblical proportions, desperate to escape before the director returned to stage to bore them some more.
The promising opening 2 minutes very quickly evaporates like an unreliable memory as soon as the real business is introduced. Narrative is sketchy to say the least and even a knowledge of the novel is not enough to get you through 90 of the longest and most incoherent minutes I can remember.
The film is tolerably well acted and populated by very pretty people. There's a particularly well-judged performance by Christian Camargo. But it's as if the cast have as little sense of where the film is going as the director himself. Tone and pacing are clueless. I'm sure that the director believes that his film is a potent comment on empty, drug-fueled lives, but unfortunately there is nothing on screen that ever rises above the predicable and tedious.
With many of Wilde's most famous aphorisms picked out for our amusement, in this director's hands they fall flat like lead balloons. It's a completely humorless piece. One joke about Wagner raised a laugh, but the majority of the laughter was of the unintentional variety.
To add to the general unpleasant feel of the film was a scene near the end set in a crack den inhabited entirely by African American people - the only African American people in the film until this point. It's a long time since I've watched a race reduced to a stereotype as blatantly offensive and ignorant as this.
Just as offensive is the director's portrayal of AIDS - signaled by the word written in a title that fills the screen in giant letters in case we are too stupid to guess what's going on. Here AIDS is presented as nothing more than a bad case of acne. Seeing Dorian with a face full of spots does not quite present the horror you'd expect of the infamous portrait in the attic.
The director gives himself more credits than you could shake a stick at. There was a Mexican wave of laughter along my row when the director's ego enabled him to receive solo credits for production design and executive producer (now, that's desperate) above the title.
The film was shown as the closing night of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and watched by an audience who clearly didn't get it. As the end credits rolled there was an exodus of biblical proportions, desperate to escape before the director returned to stage to bore them some more.
