Not as good as it ought to be

Rating: 4/10 (11 January 2007)

"Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" is always being trotted out as a masterpiece of Australian cinema. I found it quite disappointing. The lead actors are great - Terence Stamp is aging beautifully, Guy Pearce should do more comedy instead of the dour roles he chooses and I've been a fan of Hugo Weaving since I saw him play Oberon eons ago. The cinematography is great, but if you've ever been to the Australian outback, you'd know that the air is so clear and the light so brilliant that they could have shot it on the movie equivalent of a Box Brownie and it still would have looked spectacular.
So what's my problem? Well, three things. First, there is not a sympathetic female character in the whole film. A woman who has to earn her living shooting ping pong balls out of her privates in a roadside pub deserves our sympathy. Tick's wife doesn't get much better treatment.
Second, the scene when they sing "I Will Survive" to a group of Aboriginals is offensive. To try to draw any sort of parallel between the struggles of drag queens and trannies and the almost total destruction of Aboriginal culture, which is what I assume the scene is supposed to do, shows a level of historical understanding worthy of Paris Hilton.
Last of all, and the greatest defect of the film is that it just isn't funny enough. Did Stephan Elliott actually talk to any drag queens when writing the film? Anyone who knows a drag queen (or three or four) knows that most of them have rapier-like wits and they're not afraid to use them. Now, I can understand that a lot of drag queen banter probably would have got the film refused classification but Elliott should have been able to gather enough "fit for the kiddies" material to complete his film.
So, all in all, a waste of a good idea and a great cast.