Film Review #44: KINKY BOOTS (2005) *** Director: Julian Jarrold *** Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Joel Edgerton, Sarah-Jane Potts *** Since its U.S. opening last month, Kinky Boots has fallen into place as the latest “naughty” British comedy based on sexual innuendo among the strait-laced. It follows The Full Monty, Mrs. Henderson Presents and Calendar Girls, even sharing a scriptwriter and producers with the latter. Setting this film in a shoe factory – with warmly leather-hued, circling close-ups of the assembly line comprising the opening title sequence – probably encouraged complaints that Kinky Boots is just another knock-off. Kinky Boots is only a song or two shy of a full-fledged musical, a genre that depends upon not straying too far from type or complicating what happens between songs. *** It’s not hard to detect the outlines of type in this story. A fourth-generation cobbler so intimate with his craft that he carries a set of tools in his jacket, Charley Price (Joel Edgerton) – lacking self-knowledge – instead sets out for London with his social-climbing fiancé Nicola. This will be a mistake of rash youth. When Charley’s father dies, he’s soon back in Northampton. Price & Sons shoe factory is failing. One night, disheartened and drunk, he encounters punks harassing a towering Black drag queen. He’s knocked flat and Lola (the always-welcome Chiwetel Ejiofor) stashes him in her dressing room till he comes to. From backstage, he sees part of Lola’s show. It is quite good. Back home after this glimpse of the strange, he must start firing workers. With each he demurs, “What can I do?” Then one answers him, “Change the product.” This would be Lauren (Sarah-Jane Potts, familiar from TV work on NYPD Blue and Six Feet Under). Destined from that moment to replace the ill-suited fiancé, Lauren visits the drag club with Charley. Soon, tart-tongued Lola is designing stiletto boots “the color of sex” for Price & Sons’ new collection, which must make a splash at the annual international show in Milan. Ever since Mickey and Judy, saving the farm has involved performing to thunderous applause in the nick of time, so Milan means getting Lola and her back-up group onto the runway. En route, Charley discovers his own niche still lays in his own back yard. *** In Kinky Boots, the pot-holes in this road, not surprisingly, consist of getting Lola onto that factory floor with the blue-collar workers, where the drag queen tangles with the likes of shoemaker Don and his buddies. With foresight years ago, Lola’s father supplied boxing lessons. So Lola can take care of herself and has moved on to other tests of “real” manhood. As a kind of chorus, nearly every woman in Kinky Boots – even Lola’s elderly provincial landlady – seems unfazed by Lola’s presence, even affectionate. Don’s only comrade among them – ironic, since she fancies herself superior – is that rashly chosen fiancé. This doesn’t mean that women are broader-minded. Au contraire, here it signals that this is a restore-and-maintain story, not a tear-down-and-start-over story. Remember, only one gay person in Kinky Boots is around long enough to even have a name, much less a sex life or partner. *** Kinky Boots has four song and dance numbers. Naturally they star Lola. Among his increasingly apparent myriad talents, the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor sings and dances with great command. (Happily, he’s got five more films coming this year and next.) The opening number is a hummer days afterward: “I want to be eee-ville! I want to be bad!” Tap tap tap, synchronized dip, stride, twirl and grind, great eyebrow work and that deep melodic voice to which you pay sudden attention each time. *** The production and performance values for Ejiofor’s musical numbers are high. In this regard, a related film like The Full Monty seems sloppy, emphasizing raucous abandon over musical performance. Further, this film’s musical score evokes emotions any audience can connect with, as when Charley switches on the lights at Price & Sons after his father’s funeral – a moment flooded unexpectedly with Nina Simone’s voice, a dirge powerful as an undertow. Or, the torch-song instrumental that backs Lola as she impudently snakes across the factory floor to Don’s lap the first day there, setting off a firestorm of wordless, hilarious, epic struggles that cross his face. *** Director Julian Jarrold, whose first feature-length film this is after some Emmy-nominated TV work for the BBC, seems to use this story as a visual meditation upon the seductions and limits of assembly-line sameness. Some of DP Eigil Bryld’s most beautiful shots linger on machines turning leather into shoes. Charley’s dismissals of some workers are shot as a series of interchangeable conversations, suddenly derailed by Lauren’s out-of-place advice. The choreography of Lola’s production numbers is explicitly structured upon satiric repetition and mirroring of patterned movements. Lola has knowingly modeled her own persona on others (including movie incarnations, from the Lola poster on her wall). *** In contrast, Charley starts out lumpy-faced, with a hang-dog air and scruffy haircut. Many turning points depend on his clumsiness – actually his failure to live up to type. He discovers key financial papers by spilling coffee on his desk. His factory workers fill in crucial gaps after he’s fumbled with his office speaker and left it on. He stumbles on the runway in Milan. Little by little, Charley’s looks and finesse improve. When he tells that developer his factory’s not for sale, it’s like turning a lens just slightly to bring him into focus. And somehow, in the scene right after he and Lauren have kissed – did Charley duck into some Italian salon for a make-over? *** The New York Times’ Stephen Holden does not like this film but usefully commented that the movie drag queen, “flamboyantly confrontational but tenderhearted . . . arrives just in time to be the 21st-century replacement for that poignant outcast of an earlier era, the whore with a heart of gold.” He cites Gone With The Wind’s Belle Watling – a comparison Lola would like for its brush with grandeur. Just go in with your eyes open. *** This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared 5/26/06.