Peter Bradshaw 

Chop Suey

Peter Bradshaw: A loose, baggy, engaging guide to Bruce Weber's miscellaneous passions and enthusiasms
  
  


Photographer and film-maker Bruce Weber's 1988 documentary portrait of Chet Baker has just been reissued to much acclaim. Here is a kind of B-side to that hit, originally released in 2001. It's a loose, baggy, engaging guide to Weber's miscellaneous passions and enthusiasms: mainly beautiful or charismatic people for whom he has conceived a long-standing emotional crush. There's the beautiful wrestler and male model Peter Johnson, cabaret star Frances Faye, patrician magazine supremo Diana Vreeland and even British explorer Wilfred Thesiger. Weber is an impassioned advocate of rapture and pleasure - not just desire, but actual pleasure, though of a rarefied and hazily defined sort. There is, it must be said, something exasperating about Weber's reticence on the question of whether or not his is a gay aesthetic; Frances Faye is open about gayness, but Weber is oddly silent on the issue. However, the film offers much to enjoy and admire in Weber's unashamed delight in physical beauty.

 

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