Queerguru reviews Jacquline Bisset in her best performance for years in LOREN & ROSE

The 80-year-old British actress Jacquline Bisset has always been a bit of an enigma. She made her fair share of Hollywood movies but it’s the films she made in Europe that really made a star .  Francois Truffot’s Academy Award winning  Day for Night,  Le Magnifique with co-star Jean Paul Belmondo : her Cesar Award-nominated role in La Cérémonie.  It all culminated with her  earingr France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour.

She has worked steadily throughout her career in film and TV but not always in high profile projects until now  when she plays the part of an aging movie star who is being tempted by one final starring role strikes you as possibly biographical.  She plays Rose Martin, a fading film star who hasn’t worked in years but is still revered for a shocking breakthrough role in a 1972 drama called Lisa Overnight. She was lauded for her performance and the film was a major success but however it still failed to win her any further substantial roles

She didn’t help her case when she authored a cutting book—about the difficulties faced by mature Hollywood women finding work in an indifferent industry with no memory—that angered the people who remembered her from the past. Now only a few of her old fans remember her at all, mostly from a handful of embarrassing horror films.

Still prone to wanting to regain the fawning and adoration from her old fans, she jumps at the offer of a meeting with a young gay filmmaker Loren Bressher (Kelly Blatz) who wants her  tostar in his film.  He’s just had a success with a 10 minute short film about the death of his  mother, but that is not enough for him to procure financing to make his first feature film. Over time the two meet for lunches at Rose’s favorite restaurant in Topeka ostensibly to talk about the film, and as Rose loves nothing more than talking about herself, they soon became close friends.

This two-hander is very wordy and gets off to a slow start, but when it takes off Bissett shines in this role that simply had to be written for her.  Its a humdinger of a role which allows her to show us the full range of her remarkable talent ….. and even to be more than a little camp at time.   

Review by ROGER WALKER-DACK.

Creator, Owner, Editor-in-Chief.  Miami Beach, FL / Provincetown, MA

Member of G.A.L.E.C.A. (Gay & Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association) and NLGJA The Association of LGBT Journalists. and The Online Film Critics Society. Ex Contributing Editor The Gay Uk & Contributor Edge Media Former CEO and Menswear Designer of  Roger Dack Ltd in the UK ‘one of the hardest-working journalists in the business‘ Micheal Goff of Towleroad