Portrait of Jason Review

Rating: 3.5/5 

Synopsis: Filmed in Manhatten penthouse Hotel Chelsea, the 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason focuses on the eponymous subject Jason Holiday (né Aaron Payne) who is also the only seen person on-screen as he recounts various episodes within his life as a middle-aged, African-American queer.



My Thoughts: After I heard this along with several other Afro-centric films would be available on The Criterion Collection streaming service for free up until the end of June,  I decided to take advantage of it and watch and review this film in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and Pride Month, thus shooting two birds with one bullet (though the last critique I did on Boo It's Sex was also LGBTQIA+ themed). The best words I can find to laconically describe this feature would be "a raw walkthrough a broken yet persevering human psyche" and even that's an understatement of its cinematic uniqueness.

    As briefly described, the entire movie was shot in Jason's apartment over a twelve-hour period as directer Shirley Clarke interviews him alongside her partner Carl Lee who also starred in Clarke's previous films, The Connection and The Cool World, and later on Superfly, his breakthrough role. Throughout most of the film, Jason ebulliently flaunts his flamboyance with a swaggering, somewhat flippant personality filled to the brim with amusing anecdotes to tell about his life involving several incidents during his career as a male prostitute as well as a number of other odd jobs. The cinéma vérité style allows Mr. Holiday to shine as he waxes eloquently with sharp yet vulgar wit while drinking and smoking. However, the portion which really makes for a worthy reappraisal would be the last ten minutes where Carl Lee starts indignantly chastising Jason for allegedly being a deceptive, dishonest roué and con solely concerned with his self-gratification, leading Jason into an emotional breakdown which he brushes off at the end. This scene reveals just how tragic and sad his life is despite his abilities to cover it up with a seemingly unbreakable façade of levity that makes one pity his state and question the authenticity of his tales given some of his past actions.

    However, as revolutionary as the film might have been in its portrayal of both a racial and sexual minority, it was also pretty slow which is ironic since Jason's storytelling is rife with energy and did enrapture me early into it. But the issue was that by the middle, hearing these disconnected stories which are similar in tone, I began to have the case of ennui and found myself doing other random things on my phone whilst watching/listening to Jason's monologues which made the 105 minutes runtime feel like 720 minutes of footage originally shot. If the duration was curtailed a bit to 80-90 minutes, it would still flow well enough and not drag for as long.

Final Thoughts: Overall, I'd say Portrait of Jason is an interesting relic of its period exploring the life of a queer minority during the 60s and makes for a deep character analysis despite its slow pace at certain points. I recommend watching it at least once if you're interested in early black LGBT cinema.