Jon Cory aka Miss Rosewood the transgender performance artist whose outrageous act goes way beyond what most of us would find acceptable, has always claimed that her work can only meaningfully be experienced in person. It’s surprising then she agreed to allow the Danish cinematographer Helle Jensen to make her the subject of the first documentary that she has directed.
Miss Rosewood, who likes to call herself a transgender terrorist, has a notorious act where she defecates on stage, sprays her bodily fluids over the audience after prancing around naked showing off her she/he body. The extreme nature of what she is prepared to do attracts an edgy celebrity crowd always desperate for the next best thing. At The Box a very exclusive NY theatre club Miss Rosewood has made Page 6 headlines by dosing Leonardo DiCaprio with a condom full of sperm and vomiting on Susan Sarandon.
You do after all need a perverse sense of humor to watch Miss Rosewood dressed as Anna Wintour ramming pages of Vogue into her naked anus with a toilet plunger. She also has the rare claim to fame that her act actually offended Sacha Baron Cohen which everyone thought was impossible to do.
Jensen also shows Rose away from the bright stage lights and living in her apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. In her former life as a cisgender male he was married to his former therapist who talked on camera now about how their friendship remained after he wanted to transition. How celibate for a couple of decades, we see Rose preparing for breast implant surgery , which does not go smoothly at all. One of the saddest parts of the film is when Rose calls her very supportive father to break the news about the problems with her new breasts.
Rose has this very zen like quiet personna off the stage where she doesn’t identify as either a man or a woman, but she does use female pronouns. However in her act her extreme treatment of her body …….at one point she sets her penis on fire …. allows her to fulfill what must be her very intense fantasies which cannot be purely for her baying audience, but must also be for her own personal fulfillment too
Jensen shot her film over a decade and leaves you with a feeling that Miss Rosewood’s stage antics are reaching their sell-by date, but possibly by now as she has undergone more surgery to feminise herself, that she’ll be ready for the next act in her life.
Labels: 2019, documentary, explicit nudity, transgender
