Boylesque review – tender portrait of drag artist who refuses to grow old gracefully

Playful and poignant … Andrzej Szwan in Boylesque. Photograph: True Story

Still sorely underexplored on screen, the autumnal years of queer life are vibrantly explored in Bogna Kowalczyk’s lively and moving portrait of 82-year-old drag artist Andrzej Szwan, who goes by the name Lulla La Polaca on stage. Living in Poland, a country riddled with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, Andrzej brings a pop of colour to the concrete, Soviet-build apartment block where he lives alone.

As Lulla, Andrzej represents a bridge of knowledge between older and younger generations of the queer community. Andrzej talks of saunas and public bathhouses, long before the age of apps, where gay men could cruise in secret. At the same time, the film also frankly and empathically grapples with the challenges of ageing. When it comes to partying and drinking, Andrzej can’t quite keep up with his thirtysomething friends. Yet he is also too young at heart for peers of his own age, who are more interested in mushroom foraging than clubbing.

The spectre of death is always present, in playful and poignant ways. One of the earliest sequences sees Andrzej broach the idea of a stiletto-shaped urn to a funeral planner. Throughout the film, he also speaks often of Maciek, a close friend whose sudden and devastating passing made Andrzej even more aware of his own mortality. Yet he also looks towards the unexpected, even dipping his toes in the rocky waters of dating apps in search of true love.

Kowalczyk’s decision to include little in the way of archival material documenting Andrzej’s past intuitively echoes his own feelings about the march of time. Here’s a queer elder who embraces the future and its uncertainties with irresistible joie de vivre.

• Boylesque is on True Story from 1 March.