Screening as part of our Cinemasters: Sandy Powell season celebrating the veteran British costume designer. This season is part of an ongoing collaboration between GFT Cinemasters and feminist collective Invisible Women which aims to highlight contributions made by women in film history and expand definitions of authorship in cinema.
The first of Sandy Powell’s four collaborations with Todd Haynes is this thrillingly subversive musical /quasi-biopic set in the glam rock scene of seventies London. Christian Bale stars as Arthur Stuart, a journalist who becomes obsessed with unravelling the mystery of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an enigmatic former rockstar who disappeared from public life after faking his own death in the mid-1970s.
Meyers’s character is inspired by an array of musical superstars including David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Bryan Ferry, and Powell, who cut her teeth working on music videos, has a blast playing with rock iconography to create Slade’s dazzling stage outfits, a mashup of sequins, feathers and flamboyant sex appeal. Powell’s costumes are central to the intoxicating atmosphere Haynes conjures in this delightfully unhinged celebration of excess, wonder and the power of pop culture. The result is a show stopping trip of a movie which the designer has described as one of the highlights of her career.
Read Sandy Powell Progeamme Notes by Rachel Pronger – Invisible Women Co-founder
Publisher of Pat's Guide to Glasgow West End; the community guide to the West End of Glasgow. Fiction and non-fiction writer.
