Musician turned film-maker Amanda Kramer gave us a retro campy reverie of queer longing in her previous feature Please Baby Please which, though interesting, was oddly unsatisfying and insubstantial. This works much better: a genuinely strange and unsettling creation whose meaning and form can’t quite be pinned down.
It appears to be an imaginary standalone primetime US TV special which went out in some alternative dream-universe between 1975 and 1985; it is centred on one particular star, a brassy, heart-on-sleeve song-and-dance performer called Sissy St Claire, played by Sophie von Haselberg. She does musical numbers, elaborate costume changes, dance routines, goofy comedy sketches, all in the cause of entertainment. Sissy looks like a cross between Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler (Von Haselberg is in fact Midler’s daughter) with a bit of Judy Garland’s repressed agony in I Could Go on Singing.
