St. Vincent to direct a gender-swapped take on The Portrait Of Dorian Gray

By Katie Rife | August 16, 2017 | 7:14pm

Aux Features Film

Musician, filmmaker, and passionate defender of the word “fuck” Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, has set her feature-film directorial debut, according to Variety. The project will be in the spirit of Clark’s directorial debut, period, a segment in the female-focused horror anthology XX; as Variety notes with glee, it’s an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, but with a woman in the title role. This variation on the theme has been done once before, in the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Sins Of Dorian Gray, starring Belinda Bauer as an actress whose soul is trapped on film instead of in a painting.

Clark’s attempt at ruining Victorian childhoods is still in its earliest stages, but Elle screenwriter David Birke has been hired to write the script. We were mixed on Clark’s segment in XX, writing in our review: “’The Birthday Party’ plays like a Luis Buñuel-style commentary on the absurdity of bourgeois manners … the jarring sound design and dissonant music almost get it there, and Clark has a great eye for color, but in the larger context of the film, it’s another near-miss.”