Until now, I had avoided seeing Chop Suey (2001). The title alone suggested nothing that would interest me.

Then a friend encouraged me to watch it and followed up with a cryptic message.

“An elephant appears several times in Chop Suey. It might be the same elephant that wandered into the room and now refuses to leave.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

For those who have never seen Chop Suey, it is a documentary anchored around Bruce Weber’s relationship with Peter Johnson, a handsome high-school wrestler from Wisconsin who became a fashion model. Based on Weber’s photo book The Chop Suey Club (1999), it has been described as a visual memoir, using Johnson as a window into the director’s own youth, longing and pursuit of an unattainable ideal.

The film wanders freely between footage of Johnson and archival clips featuring the openly lesbian lounge singer Frances Faye, surfer Christian Fletcher, actor Jan-Michael Vincent, British explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and, amongst others, the elephant. I challenge anyone to understand immediately what the hell is going on.

But that was the nature of Weber’s filmmaking.

My friend’s remark referred to the recent controversy surrounding Weber, the photographer-cum-filmmaker who shot to fame in the late 1970s and helped reshape advertising throughout the 1980s by becoming one of the first photographers to present male models as overt sexual objects.

At the height of his career he could command more than $20,000 a day. Then came allegations of sexual misconduct and exploitation. Weber denied the accusations, and several lawsuits were later settled out of court.

There are simply too many good photographs for me to turn my back on him.

Speaking at the film’s release, Weber said:

“I just hoped this film might be interesting for students or anyone who ever picked up a camera in their life. It’s a film about how things don’t have to go in their normal progression. I hope that somebody in a small town somewhere might be inspired by it to go their own way.”

Everything in Chop Suey revolves around Peter Johnson and Weber’s fascination with youthful male beauty.

For somebody as shallow-minded as myself, that makes for compelling viewing.

Weber met the 15-year-old Johnson at Dan Gable’s Wrestling Camp in Iowa in 1996. Over the following four years he documented the young man’s maturation as he embarked on a modelling career and eventually started a family.

“I thought that Chop Suey might be the right name for a boy from Wisconsin.”

The documentary is unapologetically homoerotic. Johnson appears clothed, semi-clothed and fully naked. It feels less like voyeurism than the gaze of an artist worshipping his young, athletic and heterosexual muse, exploring longing, unrequited desire and the aesthetics of the male physique.

“Peter Johnson really got a great confidence in himself. He was able to look people straight in the eye, and he wasn’t embarrassed that he was a great poseur.”

Weber has been married to film producer Nan Bush since 1977, a fact that inevitably prompts questions about his own sexuality.

The camera seems hopelessly in love with Johnson, lingering over him in shot after shot. Weber saw in him something almost mythic: youth, beauty and a perfection that could never quite be possessed. Johnson, meanwhile, appears blissfully unaware of the spell he cast. He comes across simply as a decent small-town boy, happy to indulge Weber’s fascination but never defined by it.

When the filming ended, Johnson quietly stepped away from the mythology that had grown up around him. Rather than pursue immortality as somebody else’s muse, he chose anonymity, marriage and the raising of three children. In doing so, he achieved something far rarer than eternal youth: an ordinary life, fully lived.

So, was my friend right to suggest that I might like Chop Suey?

You bet he was.