What do Robert Mitchum and a lesbian jazz singer have in common?
Not much actually. Is it really 14 years since fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s last feature-length documentary? Ah yes, the Oscar-nominated Let’s Get Lost: a moody, monochrome portrait of drug-addled trumpeter Chet Baker. Weber’s latest is Chop Suey, an eclectic visual scrapbook narrated by the man himself, in the benevolent but slightly sinister tones of a Jehovah’s Witness. It features a ragbag of subjects (the title being Cantonese for “odds and ends”), including lesbian jazz legend Frances Faye, Robert Mitchum and, er, the martial art of jujitsu. The starting point is grinning beefcake Peter Johnson, whom Weber discovered while touring colleges looking for “modelling talent”. Johnson – not Weber, thankfully – is seen cavorting naked with elephants, cross-dressing and doing just about anything the photographer asks of him. Within reason, obviously. Freudians would probably call this filmmaking via free association. Others, the meanderings of a wealthy aesthete with too much time
