Lee Cooper’s new documentary Maisie is a portrait of David Raven who, as Maisie Trollette, is one of the world’s oldest performing drag artistes. I reviewed the film for Sight & Sound’s September 2022 issue. Here’s the opening:
The dressing-mirror montage has become a cliché of drag filmmaking, the camera lingering on the process of the drag queen applying her make-up and finessing her outfit in a simplistic supposed expression of both technical mastery and fabulous transformation. A sequence in Lee Cooper’s documentary Maisie offers something less familiar. We cut between two performers getting ready for a show in Brighton: Maisie Trollette, at 84 the UK’s oldest performing drag artiste, and Oregon’s Darcelle XV, at 87 holder of the Guinness record for the world’s oldest drag act.
Each is in their element yet also testy, decades of experience chafing against bodies in decline, and each is assisted by a helper – Maisie’s producer Allan Cardew, Darcelle’s daughter Maridee – who has clearly learned how to negotiate the resultant conditions without calamity. There are various delicate and laborious kinds of craft, skill, patience and care going on here as tights are navigated over unreliable legs, shoehorns applied to forgivingly structured flats, chandelier earrings gaffer-taped onto fleshy lobes. There’s nothing effortless about any of this; the aesthetic, the relational and the mechanical come together to make something remarkable.
You can read the review in full here. Maisie is out in the UK on Friday 5 August 2022.
