By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 6/26/24 – Screening at San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival on Wednesday, June 26, at 8:30 PM in the Vogue Theatre is Lady Like (2024), an endearing documentary by Luke Willis about San Francisco’s hometown drag queen Lady Camden.
Winner of the RuPaul’s Drag Race Royalty in the show’s 14th season, Lady Camden’s fairytale story is filled with growth, discovery, and a true passion for performance in this imaginative, heartfelt documentary. Born in the UK, Camden (aka Rex Wheeler) recounts a difficult childhood, and how ballet became a path to self-expression. As her professional career had its ups and downs, she journeyed to Northern California (Sacramento and San Francisco, specifically) where drag artistry became a new passion, eventually catapulting her to reality TV stardom on Season 14 of the hit show.
Personally, I am not a follower of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but being Los Angeles-based, it is difficult to avoid the general fascination with the bigger stars of RuPaul’s show and their huge fan base. What makes this documentary about Rex Wheeler as Lady Camden more accessible is Rex’s honesty as a person and his true talent as a dancer. In half of film, Rex is just himself, without make-up or flashy drag costumes. Coming from a difficult experience as an introvertive child often teased at school, Rex explains that more drastic event in his young life was the suicide of his older brother, a talented artist. As the child, Rex loved dancing and that set him apart from the rest of the boys at school.
Rex Wheeler was happy to leave his life in working-class London suburb of Camden behind and pursue his dream of performing ballet with the London Opera. His two years of ballet training took him to many stages in Europe, but that ended with an unfortunate injury that put him months to recover. So, he had to find a new and different life. So, he headed to San Francisco where he felt free of the personal restrictions on his life. Curiously he ended up in Sacramento, California, which he still considers his hometown. It was in Sacramento that Rex first created his drag persona of Lady Camden, obviously named after his hometown in the U.K. With his agility as a trained ballet dancer, he could perform moves on stage that went far beyond the stagecraft of most drag queens.
Ballet is what informs the style of Lady Camden as a performer. Lady Like showcases Camden finding her chosen family, her voice, and confidence, proving that embracing oneself and artistic core is an important step towards healing.
The reason this documentary works so well is because the director Luke Willis is himself was a classical ballet dancer for the San Francisco Ballet and Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. Ballet very much informs his sensibility as a director: timing, musicality, a deep understanding of physicality, and an obsession with the moving visual tableau to tell high-stakes stories.
Luke also loves to juxtapose fantasy or magical realism with hyperrealism to get deeper into a character’s mind. To show how there is a rich subtextual creative undercurrent brewing in all of us that helps us find our way in the world. In some subtle way, there is always a “dream ballet” woven into all of Luke’s films. As that is what makes one of the ballet sequences featuring Lady Camden in Lady Like especially memorable.
Lady Like makes wises choices (including some fun animation sequences) as Camden/Wheeler recounts a painful childhood, a passion for ballet and a commitment to excellence when onstage. This is not your typical drag queen documentary, and one grows to appreciate the human warmth of Rex Wheeler and his love of a live audience as a performer on stage.
Luke Willis is a San Francisco based filmmaker whose award-winning short films have been screened at more than 40 film festivals around the world, including Academy Award and BAFTA qualifying festivals like Outfest, Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, BFI Flare, Encounters and NewFest. Luke studied filmmaking at USC School of Cinematic Arts, and afterward developed his passion for queer cinema while working as an assistant on the 2019 Tribeca Audience Award-winning feature documentary Gay Chorus Deep South, about The SF Gay Men’s Chorus of which he is also a former member and guest artist. Luke loves stories of magical realism, romance, and adventure.
Luke’s sensibility as a filmmaker is very much rooted in his experience growing up as a gay boy in the conservative South in the 90s. As a young man, he found his refuge and sanctuary in the theater with an extra special love for musical theater and later he left acting conservatory to become a classical ballet dancer. This was his awakening to storytelling that transcends language: Dance is the art of communicating all the things left unsaid.
Ballet very much informs Luke’s sensibility as a director: timing, musicality, a deep understanding of physicality, and an obsession with the moving visual tableau to tell high-stakes stories. Luke also loves to juxtapose fantasy or magical realism with hyperrealism to get deeper into a character’s mind. To show how there is a rich subtextual creative undercurrent brewing in all of us that helps us find our way in the world. In some subtle way, there is always a “dream ballet” woven into all of Luke’s films.
Rex Wheeler performing as Lady Camden manages to do consistently on stage is to use dance brilliantly in his performance. His confidence on stage is more apparent is his graceful and perfectly choreographed movements. Until many drag queens whose modus operandi is just lip-synching pop songs. Lady Camden represents the best of what dance brings to such performance art.
At the screening at the Vogue Theatre on June 26, Luke Willis, Lady Camden and producer Cookie Walukas are slated to attend.
