valentino: shiny, but no insight

(1977. dir: Ken Russell) You know what you're getting into with a Ken Russell biopic: not literal truth, but stabs, some of them quite playful, at metaphorical truths. Nureyev is, in retrospect, a brilliant choice to embody Valentino. Both men are primarily dancers, own powerfully androgynous sex appeals, and are palpably "other", sporting the thick accents of those just off the boat from distant lands.

Although it is one of Russell's tamer ventures, without the extreme oddity of, say, Lisztomania or Gothic, it bears the Russell hallmarks. The grotesquerie of the jail scene brings to mind Tchaikovsky's wedding night on the train in the Music Lovers, or Sister Jeanne's twisted visions from the Devils. The pace is good, and the costumes and sets are suitably gorgeous and baroque. What we don't come away with, and what we want most from a biopic, is psychological insight. Even just one "oh, I get it" moment would suffice, and Russell never gives us one.

A framing device involving the various women in his life coming forward, one by one, at his funeral to tell a piece of his story, is dangerously pat but Russell has the skills to pull it off, just barely. All the women come off badly, not only Nazimova (Leslie Caron) played up to full tilt diva, but Rambova (Michelle Phillips) portrayed as a talentless, heartless user, a representation which is unfair at least inasmuchas she did obviously own enormous talent in her own right. Even June Mathis (Felicity Kendal), the powerfully successful screenwriter who launched Valentino's career and stood staunchly by him until the end (and beyond, burying him in her own family vault and following him within a year), becomes, within Russell's purview, ineffective and merely lovesick.

This got horribly panned when it came out, but it's a great wonder that any of Russell's strange, visionary films ever avoided that fate. This is not his best, but certainly not his worst. One of the problems is the controversy over Valentino himself, which I think still rumbles: he is now accepted as gay, but how gay was his lifestyle? He obviously genuinely loved women. Did he have a sex life with women? Was it successful? Did he and Rambova enjoy a thriving dom/sub relationship, as suggested by the "slave bracelet"? How much sex did he have with men? What was his attitude towards it? I think that Valentino himself would approve of Russell's perspective, focusing on the women in his life, because that's where he himself placed the emphasis. If you'd asked him what the lynchpin of his story was, he'd have been the first to say it was Rambova.