The price of admission, as they say, is justified by the sight of legendary German actor Udo Kier in a Dynasty-era lime-green pantsuit, heels, sunglasses, a rakishly inclined hat and a More cigarette smouldering between his lips. In another of his arrestingly unpredictable career-swerves, Kier now teeters on a knife-edge between throwaway camp humour and sentimental sorrow, playing Pat Pitsenbarger, a character based on a real-life figure from director Todd Stephens’s Ohio home town.
Pat is a retired hairdresser, now in a care home; he is recovering from a stroke, still alert, although secretly addicted to his cigarettes and an obsessive habit of folding paper napkins into the kind of small square shape that used to go under highball glasses in the bars where he once hung out. He is visited by a haughty lawyer, Mr Shanrock (Tom Bloom), and Pat’s nurse can’t believe that her patient will wish to see this man: “Shall I tell him you’re dead?” Shanrock tells Pat his late client Mrs Rita Parker Sloan (Linda Evans) – the Republican society hostess whose coiffure was nurtured by Pat every Friday afternoon – has left instructions in her will that Pat should do the hair and makeup work on her corpse before she is buried. So Pat has to reassemble his flamboyant clothing ensemble and sashay across town for this final job, his chef-d’oeuvre, and make his peace with his memories of Rita’s snobbery and homophobia – and also with his hairdressing rival Dee Dee Dale (Jennifer Coolidge), who stole his most famous client.
There are plenty of laughs here and Kier doesn’t have to work very hard to get them: he demonstrates a tremendous hauteur in the way Pat asks for various inaccessible items at the local convenience store and then like a Vegas high-roller, while other customers are impatiently lining up behind him, demands various lottery scratchcards: “Hit me!” Like Werner Herzog, Kier’s German accent lends a deadpan drollery to everything he says, but there is a gooey soft-centre to his film, and Kier carries that off reasonably well, his face becoming almost boyish. Another intriguing persona in the Udo Kier gallery.
• Swan Song is released on 10 June in cinemas.
