Chopped Up Vignettes with Nowhere to Go

In concept and execution, Chop Suey is a marvelous paradox. It is an “autobiographical documentary” about the world of high fashion, of glitzy entertainment, of celebrity—essentially of people who create and inhabit sublime artificial realities. Bright colors, strange costumes and set pieces command its filmic landscape. Fabulous and freakish personalities float past the lens. We lucky spectators get nice heaping eyefuls of homoerotic icons, fashion designers, super athletes, bright shining Stars, surfer dudes, tragically hip youth, quadriplegic artists. Everything is ready for its close-up; everything is so chock full of life and attitude, it sometimes feels too full.

And who is providing the lens to this Eye Candy land? Well, his name is Bruce Weber. You probably haven’t heard of him, but he is a filmmaker and fashion photographer, and any magazine you can think of has probably featured his work. Weber was the pioneer of a very distinct photographic style and sensibility, which combines many disparate, extraordinary elements into one fantastical new scene. His interests run to the glamorous and the atypical. To him, laws of nature recede in the face of personal taste; his obsession, to quote one Pet Shop Boys song, is “never being boring.”

His first full-length documentary since 1988’s Let’s Get Lost, Chop Suey is an extended scrapbook session of his life and career, rendered in striking color. On a personal tour through his extensive back catalogue, he takes his camera into smoky jazz clubs and under water, ring-side at boxing matches and bed-side in nurseries. He turns a train trestle into an oversized jungle gym for Adonis Males. He shows us elephants romping in the surf, and strapping lads trotting jauntily alongside as Golden Retrievers, groomed to white-blond perfection.

In style as well as substance, Chop Suey not only explores Weber’s personal tastes but also replicates his particular creative process. Weber, we come to see, experiences the world as his own personal jewel-mine. He scavenges it for the choicest raw materials, then cuts and sets and polishes them until they shine with a luminousness only attainable through masterful craft. Simultaenously being a photographer, his god-like role extends even further: he doesn’t just create the world, he also presents it, selecting and cropping and editing it into one supreme final image. He works tirelessly, until he has something wholly new and undeniably beautiful.

Despite Weber’s obsessive grooming and refining of materials, his tastes are strikingly multi-faceted. This diversity perhaps accounts for the film’s narrative style, which is free-form and free-associative to a head-spinning degree. Archival footage of outrageous singer-pianist Frances Faye will dissolve into a filmed sequence of desert explorer Sir Wilfred Thesinger, which will morph into a series of still shots from small-town parade, which will change into a picture of a young model wearing a turban and silk shawls. Characters and events tumble by, with nary a clear transition or connection to help us understand where they fall. We cannot make sense of this movie’s methods, just as we can never know what happens in another person’s head.

For such a personal film, however, Weber seems conspicuously, almost alarmingly, distant. Throughout his own “autobiographical documentary,” Weber gives himself the un-intrusive role of guide and narrator and makes only the rarest appearances in front of his own camera. His running commentary, now casually reflective, now mytho-poetical, reveals his sense of marked detachment from the world he examines. “We sometimes photograph what we could never be,” he sighs in wistful voiceover.

To reinforce this important theme of inaccessibility, of the utter uniqueness and unnaturalness of the world he films, Weber employs all kinds of unsubtle cinematic devices. Within the frame of his movie camera are more photographs, more cameras, flipping pages full of mementos. Interview subjects direct their comments not to the camera, but to third or fourth parties on screen, whom Weber has positioned as the interrogator, the intermediary. Everything is two-or-threefold detached.

And in a way, all of this detachment is precisely the point. Going back to that paradox mentioned earlier, the film’s world is one that, by necessity, no average onlooker is supposed to understand. Weber’s are subjects whose very existence is dependent on the level of mystery and intrigue that surround their names and images. We’re supposed to stare at them, to be arrested and impressed and maybe even obsessed…but certainly not to understand them. That wouldn’t be right; it wouldn’t seem fair.

The film, then, is chiefly about Weber’s vision; nothing else matters quite as much, because nothing else is so definable, or real. It is Weber’s blessing to have the ability—through power, influence, talent, skill—to create and capture a world that meets his fantasies. It is his curse, in a way, to recognize the limits of that world. To be sure, it is beautiful, refined, and spectacular…but it is also utterly unachievable, utterly false.