Hollywood mainstream cinema's dichotomic gender conventions are rambunctiously breached in 1982, Sydney Pollack's TOOTSIE has a bruised male ego get a fresh start by purporting to be the opposite sex, and Blake Edwards' VICTOR VICTORIA is the obverse, a woman in drag, pretending to be a man who pretends to be a woman.
Such follies are conveniently timed in the interwar years of Paris, a gay nightclub performer Toddy (Preston), who has long passed his peak, meets a down-and-out soprano, Victoria Grant (Andrews), they hit it off immediately, the next morning, Toddy comes up with the wheeze to pass her off as a man, a homosexual Polish Count Victor Granzinski, who is Toddy's new boyfriend and specializes in female impersonation for his barnstorming stage performance, naturally, Victor becomes the new sensation and the toast of the town, ineluctably catches the eyes of King Marchand (Garner), a visiting Chicago club owner and gangster, attended with his vacuous blonde moll Norma Cassidy (Warren) and thickset bodyguard Squash (Karras). While the feelings between King and Victoria are mutual, for a macho gangster,the rub is whether he is able to admit that he can fall in love with a man, which the film craftily circumvents in the plot and vouchsafes King the crucial line “I don't care if you are a man!” before sealing a kiss with Victoria, only unbeknownst to her, he twigs the lowdown beforehand.
Shot in its entirety on a soundstage, VICTOR VICTORIA grandiosely blends the old-fashion sumptuousness (Art Deco hotel rooms, a high-end night club, etc.) with its trailblazing gender-bending, proto-feminist agenda to a uniformly jocose hotchpotch, here, Andrews, retrospectively for the last time, soothes and stuns audience with her trademark four-octave soprano timbre on the silver screen, and the music numbers penned by Henry Mancini capitalize on that to the maximum, and never diminish her benign graciousness in spite of the cabaret purlieus, which is counterpoised by Warren's hilarious turn as a batty bimbo who wards off any subtlety with an all-out blast of theatrics and histrionics, a larger-than-life caricature which a high-pitched, affected Warren wallows in on steroids.
As for the melodramatic love affair for the mature age, Andrews and a muddled and resigned Garner never transgress the drawing-room codes in action but the unorthodox idea behind their “same sex” union is upfront and far-seeing for future generations, not to mention at a certain moment, a coming-out story pops up from the most unexpected corner.
Veteran star Preston also revels in his last hurrah as an out-and-out gay dandy who can also carry a tone just for the hell of it, earning his first and only Oscar nomination, Toddy becomes an unabashed queer cinema icon who only reflects the buoyant side for having batted for the other team all his life, and he and Victoria spearhead the friendship-bonding between “a gay man and a straight gal” that would become a staple in our society in due course. Preston (quite a carbon copy of Alan Bates) is such a sensation, not simply for his hale gameness, smart savior faire and suaveness, but significantly his surprising and risible reprise of THE SHADY DAME FROM SEVILLE that brings down the house at his own expense of slapstick and crudeness,which almost makes us forget why on earth a veritable soprano fails to compete with a male impersonator in the first place.
referential entries: Blake Edwards' SOB (1981, 7.3/10); Sydney Pollack's TOOTSIE (1982, 8.0/10).
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