Shantay, Bouvier
To say that Jackie is a camp classic in the making isn't to say that it's a bad film. It's even, at times, a very good film, particularly in its formal mastery which extends to the composition, camerawork, palette and score. But the qualities in Jackie are precisely what prevent it from being trash, thereby making it camp. The film's artifice and mannerisms, its purposeful vulgarity and body horror, its quotable bon mots, its impish delight in tearing down institutions, and last but not least the huge female performance at its centre, make it, at least in this viewer's eyes, a bona fide gay trip. Jackie is a film about a woman struggling to keep alive her public image and uphold the carefully constructed idea of the American fairytale. Jackie Kennedy's turmoil in the days after the assassination of JFK, then, becomes almost a pretext for a revisionist disquisition on femininity, sexuality, motherhood. The film does not pretend to show the real woman: rather...