evergreen brick works
wednesday AUGUST 30, 2023

Velvet goldmine

With the short film Midnight at the Continental

Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine transports us to London and New York of the early 70s, when underground and glam rock artists like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Queen were taking both sides of the Atlantic by storm. But rather than give us a straight biopic of one of these icons, the film focuses on the fictional Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an enigmatic David Bowie-esque figure who fakes his own death to withdraw from public life. To explore Slade’s history, Haynes adopts the plot structure of Citizen Kane, with a pitch-perfect Christian Bale as Arthur Stuart, a gay journalist tasked with uncovering the mystery by interviewing people from Slade’s life, including his friend/rival/former lover Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) and his ex-wife Mandy Slade (Toni Collete), both actors giving career-best performances. In doing so, Haynes Queers the canonical Kane, and weaves a rich intertextual tapestry of references to Queer culture – crucially, Slade’s own Rosebud is not a memento of his childhood, but a piece of jewelry once owned by Oscar Wilde (which may or may not have been given to Wilde by aliens from another planet). 

Paired with Velvet Goldmine is Midnight at the Continental, directed by Toronto’s Lauren Hortie and Sonya Reynolds, which recounts the history of Toronto’s first long-standing lesbian bar, The Continental, which opened in Chinatown in 1955. The Continental transforms into another world for Toronto’s lesbian communities, who enter into an unlikely alliance with the city’s growing Chinese-Canadian community and other marginalized patrons to fight back against police raids and tabloid rumors about goings-on at the bar.