There’s a whole lot of unfortunate extratextuality running through Amanda Kramer’s misguided Give Me Pity!, which no doubt marketers and the few people who watch the film will delight in playing upon. Designed to replicate a 1970s variety TV show in which the star’s need for the audience’s love pushes her to breaking point, it plays heavily on the marked resemblance between its star, Sophie von Haselberg, and her mother Bette Midler. The old disclaimer, “Any similarity to actual persons…is purely coincidental” does appear at the end, and yes, the fictional protagonist’s projection of insecurity and delusion is miles away from Midler’s known persona, but we live in a post-Mommie Dearest world, and anyone who doesn’t question what Kramer thinks she’s doing by styling von Haselberg to look exactly like her mother in the same decade is simply blind. The disingenuousness of this appropriation – the character behaves nothing like the Divine Miss M – is bad enough, but it’s made even worse by the film’s tiresome clunkiness.
Kramer (whose feature Please Baby Please also premieres in Rotterdam) confesses to a fascination with variety shows of the era, when stars like Barbra Streisand, Cher and Ann-Margret entertained America with a mix of music, dance and banter designed to project an easy-going familiarity that conveyed friendship to female audiences and sexual availability to men; both, of course, illusions. Give Me Pity! aims to replicate that genre, from the specially written songs to the corny skits and cornier “Stay Tuned!” cards, and while they show off von Haselberg’s scope, they’re flat and just not clever, punctuated by (deliberately?) clumsy nightmarish visions. It’s neither an insightful commentary on diva syndrome nor is it camp, which at its best wraps emotion around cliché and nukes them both into a delirious self-reflexive paean to performativity. Like Kramer’s Ladyworld it feels like it could have worked better as a stage piece, but even then, for what audience?
The whole thing is made as if we’re watching a primetime Saturday night network television special taped before a live audience starring Sissy St. Claire (von Haselberg), the multi-talented darling of the airwaves. In her first skit she’s dressed like a communion girl, talking about her dreams of success and how she and Jesus are both big entertainers who recognize there’s no such thing as originality (ahem): the best you can hope for is to add your own twist somehow. Cut to a dance number, with St. Claire looking uncannily like Midler in a silver spangly outfit and blonde frizzy hair, singing the disco-infused “Making It!” She’s riding high on her celebrity, so when a mysterious masked man (M. Diesel) in the wings momentarily throws her off her routine, she needs to push down the fear and reclaim her perfection.
The ensuing uninspired routines play on her terror of not making it, of losing her status as the kind of star whose ability to make the public think she’s taken them into her confidence gets her primetime Saturday night specials. Each number is sabotaged either by an unexpected change in the script or the menacing masked Phantom backstage whose presence is followed by cheap flashing inverted color effects. He is her internal fears made concrete, dogging her success and reminding her of just how unstable a position it is to be on a pedestal disguised as a confessional. St. Claire’s need for the audience’s love recalls Liza Minnelli’s almost painful craving for affirmation, but Minnelli’s rawness has always been an integral part of her magnetism – St. Claire is, to be frank, just another entertainer.
Kramer’s self-indulgence is dispiriting and the observations she means to make about a certain kind of diva culture have all been delineated far more cogently by any number of social commentators using feminist and queer lenses with an insight and panache one longs for here. Sure, von Haselberg holds the screen, but she deserves better material. While the film’s design aims for an unspecific multi-decade look, the overriding feel is low-budget mid-70s to mid-80s, as are the songs of Giulio Carmassi and Bryan Scary.
Director: Amanda Kramer
Screenplay: Amanda Kramer
Cast: Sophie von Haselberg, Tess Hewlett, Malachi Middleton, Reshma Gajjar, Cricket Arrison, M. Diesel, Annie Kyle
Producers: Sarah Winshall, Jacob Agger, Amanda Kramer, Benjamin Shearn
Executive producers: Rhiannon Jones, Riccardo Maddalosso, Samuel Gursky
Cinematography: Patrick Meade Jones
Production design: Liz Toonkel
Costume design: Jamie Ortega
Editing: Benjamin Shearn
Music: Giulio Carmassi, Bryan Scary
Sound: Josh Ascalon, Kevin Coons
Production companies: Neon Heart Productions (USA), Smudge Films (USA), Irving Harvey (USA)
World sales: alief
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Focus: Amanda Kramer)
In English
79 minutes
