![]() ![]() The actual story of Queen’s progress and development as outré and wildly versatile hit-makers is rather laboriously charted-not least because of the production involvement by other band members and their manager Jim Beach. He baffles these stolid hippie lads with his new name for the band-“As in Royal Highness-and because it’s outrageous”-and the rest is history. Then he blasts them with an impromptu demonstration. Freddie offers to step into the breach, but the band members don’t think he has what it takes to be a singer because of those extraordinary teeth-although he explains that his four extra incisors increase his range. We then flash back to 1970, with Bulsara seen working as a baggage handler at Heathrow and at home with his worried, highly traditional parents, telling them, “It’s Freddie now.” His dad ruefully shakes his head-“You can’t get anywhere pretending to be someone you’re not”-showing a fundamental misunderstanding of showbiz.įreddie goes off to a gig by a band named Smile, who are temporarily on the skids, as their singer is leaving to join a band with better prospects, called Humpy Bong (believe it or not, this is actually true). The film opens in 1985, with Freddie in his luxury home, draped in a silk dressing gown, alone but for his cats and a print of Marlene Dietrich-establishing a theme of the lonely, doomed gay man, which the film milks persistently as if it had actually been made in 1971 or thereabouts. And to its credit, the film does more or less attempt this-but it does so wearing hob-nailed workboots, rather than the satin slippers required by such a delicate dance. There’s a fascinating story to be told about how Mercury’s identity, both as an Asian immigrant and a gay man, was subsumed by the normative mainstream of British culture. Mercury’s camp performance style and lyrical repertoire were really homeopathic in the context of the band: a little dose of harmless pantomime fun that leavened the galumphing heaviness of what became one of the ultimate blokes’ bands, and corporate dinosaurs, in 20th-century pop. Yet you rarely hear of gay fans claiming that they were liberated by his persona in the way that so many were in the ’70s by Bowie, Lou Reed, and others. Born Farrokh Bulsara, the son of Parsi immigrants from Zanzibar, Mercury invented himself wholesale out of a British tradition of West End theatricality, raffish music-hall comedy, and hippie preciousness, creating a persona that started off as a flouncy frills-and-scarves flamboyance, later switching to a cartoon version of sex-club queerness. You could say that the film’s lukewarm quality is true to the band itself: Queen come to mind as bohemian only in a very adulterated sense, in that superficially the band had all the trappings of glam rock’s sexual ambivalence, yet came to embody the “classic rock” tradition at its most macho and heterosexual. By the 1970s in Britain, however, when this film begins, the word was thoroughly debased, and effectively denoted anyone who occasionally ate salads or wore a velvet jacket at weekends-and that’s pretty much the flaccid sense of the word that comes to mind when watching the film.Ī troubled production, with Sacha Baron Cohen leaving early on, Bohemian Rhapsody is scripted by Anthony McCarten, with the direction credit going to Bryan Singer-although he too left the project mid-shoot, with Dexter Fletcher stepping into the breach. Once referring to a specific Eastern European kingdom, the word “bohemian” came to refer to anyone who had an artistic, marginal lifestyle, and was regarded by those to whom it was applied as a badge of honor. ![]() The other is the entirety of Rami Malek’s performance as the band’s singer Freddie Mercury-pretty much the only reason to see the film. ![]() One is the playful transformation of the familiar opening 20th Century Fox fanfare, brass replaced by the band’s trademark sound of gnarly guitars and choral falsettos. ![]() There are two magnificent flourishes in Bohemian Rhapsody, the long-awaited Queen biopic. ![]()
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