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Limelight
Directed by Billy Corben (USA, Special Presentations)
Thursday, May 5, 6 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Saturday, May 7, at 4:00 p.m.
The ROM Theatre (100 Queen’s Park)
“Living in the limelight,” Geddy Lee once sang, “[Is] the universal dream.” It’s a sentiment that must ring true for deposed New York club king Peter Gatien, the Ontario native who redefined the NYC club scene with his Limelight nightclub in the 1980s.
Gatien’s rise from small-town venture entrepreneur (he opened a few blue jean stores with a $17,000 settlement he received after having his right eye crooked out in hockey) to clubland impresario is the sort of capitalist success story that’s inherently interesting. But know this: Limelight is abysmally assembled. Beset by stitched together voice-over, laughably lousy 3D Movie Maker digital graphics, and spinning newspaper headlines careening towards us, it’s hard not to suspect that Gatien himself hastily slapped it together in hopes of paying off some of the back-taxes he owes. It’s actually aesthetically abrasive.
Corben seems to attribute the so-called “Lord of Late Night”‘s decline equally to Guiliani’s no-bullshit approach to drugs, and the move from rave-friendly pills like X to downers like ketamine. But it’s awfully unfocused. What tries to be a film about drugs, club kids, police tactics, and racism ultimately winds up being only about Gatien. And despite a late game attempt to explain why we should care about a culture of vapid fabulousness, Limelight never makes a convincing case for why the party monsters Gatien provided a rave space for really matter, or why he’s anything more than a savvy businessman.