Freddie mercury movie full#
With the greatest of respect to the band’s other members, when you think of Queen, you think of Mercury got up in full leather, dressed like a ballet dancer, naked except for a pair of tiny shorts, or swishing his way through Killer Queen on Top of the Pops.
There’s no mention of the debt Queen effectively owed to Mercury’s queerness, which gave them everything from their name to their image. Perhaps a certain ridiculousness is perfectly fitting – few bands have so revelled in and owned their own piquant OTTness – but the depiction of Mercury’s sexuality seems unnecessarily reductive. But then Bohemian Rhapsody is a film that plays so fast and loose with the truth, it ends up seeming faintly ridiculous: you start out nitpicking about minor chronological errors (one Queen obsessive took to social media to protest that the kind of reel-to-reel tape seen in the recording of Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t in production in 1975) and end up with your jaw on the floor during a deranged final sequence that posits that Mercury found true love, came out to – and reconciled with – his parents, then played Live Aid on the same day.įull leather … on the News of the World tour in 1978. It goes without saying that in virtually every other account of his life, Mercury does not come across as a man who needed a great deal of luring where sex and drugs were concerned.
Here, Prenter is a devious gay man who, among his compound wrongs and manipulations, lures Mercury into a twilight world of drugs, orgies and S&M clubs, and thus ultimately to his death. The film’s villain, meanwhile, is unequivocally Mercury’s personal manager, Paul Prenter, a hugely controversial figure in the Queen story, not least because he sold stories about Mercury’s sex life to the Sun while the singer was dying of Aids (Prenter himself died of the disease a few months before Mercury did). A reporter from the US magazine Circus who attended the legendarily debauched launch party for their 1978 album Jazz noted with surprise: “Brian May seems to be the true organiser of the night’s carnival.” Yet watching the film, you think: “God, imagine being in a band at the height of the most sybaritic decade in rock with this bunch of prigs.” Anyone with a passing interest in the band knows this is nonsense. It also seems to give him a taste for hedonism that makes him unreliable and unprofessional: according to the film, the rest of Queen seem to have spent the late 70s and 80s tutting and rolling their eyes at Mercury’s behaviour before demurely excusing themselves from whatever deranged bacchanal their singer was leading the charge at and going to bed early. You watch the film and think: 'God – imagineīeing in a band with this bunch of prigs' It drives a musical wedge between the band and their frontman, whose ideas for songs and styles are increasingly founded on his experiences in gay clubs and viewed as antithetical to the spirit of the band. His homosexuality leaves him lonely, unable to share his bandmates’ domestic happiness as they settle down into marriage and parenthood. It’s a film that seems to view the fact that Mercury was gay as little short of a tragedy. But its depiction of his sexuality is more troubling. We see Mercury facing down racist abuse while working as a baggage handler at Heathrow and from an audience member at an early gig. So much for the workings of the average mind.”īohemian Rhapsody isn’t bad on the issue of Mercury’s race, a subject usually ignored or dismissed as beside the point in the story of Queen. “Wow, they dig Monsieur Freddie and they call me queer. “ shouted, ‘Fuck off, you queer!’ at me,” recalled an incredulous Cope. In his autobiography Head On, Julian Cope recounts the experience of supporting Queen at Milton Keynes Bowl in 1982, as part of the Teardrop Explodes, and being showered with homophobic abuse by their fans. ‘They dig Monsieur Freddie and they call me queer’ Photograph: Anwar Hussein/Getty
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