A noir-ish montage of images and a voiceover ruminating on the immorality of Hollywood introduces The Queen of Hollywood Blvd, a self-professed crime drama which promises to pitch a hard-bitten club owner against the tactics of a gang of organised criminals. On paper, the film does just this – but the style and tone involved are not what many would expect, and indeed anyone expecting a high-action piece of work would find themselves feeling all at sea after watching this movie. Your tolerance for this take on a crime story depends very much on your tolerance for slow-burn, almost art-house cinema generally.
Our protagonist, ‘Queen’ Mary (Rosemary Hochschild) – who looks at first to be channelling Kristin Scott Thomas in Only God Forgives with the gear she’s wearing – runs a strip club in Hollywood Boulevard’s shadow, and she’s spent twenty years building up the business. In fact, the club’s anniversary coincides with a landmark birthday for Mary; it’s her 60th, so she plans to throw a special party. Like the cop working one last shift before retiring, things invariably go awry. An old associate named Duke (Roger Guenveur Smith) rocks up, claiming that he’s come to collect on an old and clearly substantial debt. Why now, when criminal fraternities aren’t exactly known for shelving debts owed to them for decades? Well, it all adds to the drama I suppose. Mary is, in effect, told that the club no longer belongs to her. She is to hand over the keys to another associate later that night, and then make herself scarce.
Undeterred, she goes about her business, trying to enjoy her birthday with a bit of cake and a few casual lines of illicit substances. However, when it turns out that the crooks have got a hold of her grown-up son to make sure she toes the line, Mary is forced after all to deal with them. They want to strike a bargain, enlisting her help for a few nefarious schemes – although this doesn’t mean she gets to keep the club, rather that she gets to keep her boy. Cue a crisis of conscience to go alongside the more general crisis, as Mary tries to negotiate her way through this situation.
The Queen of Hollywood Blvd is a visually-arresting but, truth be told, in several respects a very frustrating viewing experience. Director and writer Orson Oblowitz is delivering his first feature length film here, and to give due credit he has a good eye for visuals, in particular editing together grand cityscapes with painterly club interiors, using the otherworldly neons to good effect (again, Only God Forgives springs to mind). He is also reaching for an emphasis on character, and it’s good to see an older woman in a lead role who hasn’t been sandblasted by a plastic surgeon, but actress Hochschild is kept so deadpan and introspective that it’s difficult to get a real sense of her internal life and motivations, which are utterly key to driving the narrative onward. Her own lines are somewhat flat and peppered with platitudes, too, which also works against what could have been.
In other scenes, the script aims to be more naturalistic, and even adds in odd glimpses of humour reminiscent of Tarantino’s asides (though not attaining that; say what you like about Tarantino, but he’s superb at capturing something of the inanity and charm of everyday conversation). Also akin to Tarantino there’s heavy use of music, but perhaps most similarly of all we get yellow on-screen text to announce each new ‘act’ of the film, so Kill Bill can and does keep on intruding into your appreciation of this film.
I also found that some minor issues caught my eye; some continuity issues are in there, but then a bigger issue is that the film’s position in time was unclear. I found myself wondering why, say, one of the crooks had a framed picture of Reagan on the wall and VCRs figure in the plot, but then the streets are full of modern vehicles and the girls at the club have very modern-style tattoos. It could be that the film has opted quite deliberately to belong to that timeless, rootless type of setting which focuses fashionably on the lo-fi and doesn’t want us to know when these events are taking place, but I always find this distracting personally, an attempt to ignore time which makes me wonder about nothing else. (It Follows, I’m looking in your direction here.) But all of these things would be minor, were it not for the fact that The Queen of Hollywood Blvd is, I am afraid to say, quite so slow and ponderous as it is. Its deliberate pace and minimal action means that very little happens within the first hour; unless the atmosphere is note-perfect and engrossing, then this can be alienating. It even risks an audience’s engagement completely, something which worked against it in my case.
The Queen of Hollywood Blvd could quite possibly engage patient viewers with a penchant for brooding, minimalistic spins on crime drama, those for whom mood conquers everything. It’s also an artistic film. Perhaps the fact that it so clearly nods to other filmmakers who have achieved the very things it seems to have been influenced by works against it, emphasising its flaws rather than its strong points.
The Queen of Hollywood Blvd receives an On Demand release on October 16th 2018.