Art is long, life is short, and sometimes films get caught in the middle. Art and life are the main subjects of “High Art,” an audacious American independent feature set in the contemporary New York worlds of trendy magazines, gallery photography and heroin chic.
“High Art” is a film about the perils of being an uncompromising artist, the destructiveness of the modern commercially obsessed world. The subject is rich; the treatment provocative. But though Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature shows talent and ambition, it sinks into art-house cliches, the way big studio formula movies get swamped by their own brand of glossy stereotypes.
Cholodenko tries to mine high art out of low life and personal pain. Her story is about the lesbian romance of a reclusive genius — Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), a heroin-snorting photographer — and Syd (Radha Mitchell), a bouncy, idealistic young photography magazine editor. Following their little pas de deux of desire, seduction and betrayal, “High Art” evokes a world where high style and low life intersect. Syd is a rising young assistant editor for the chi-chi photojournal “Frame,” while Lucy is a once-legendary photographer who abandoned her career at its peak and, coincidentally, lives just upstairs from Syd.
They meet when Syd, after some problems with boyfriend James (Gabriel Mann), goes upstairs to complain about a bathtub leak. She’s quickly sucked into Lucy’s world: her friends, including her German actress addict-lover Greta (Patricia Clarkson), draped around the couches in a druggie drowse and, most of all, Lucy’s photos (mostly of Greta), hung around the bathroom walls. Immediately, these misty candid shots strike Syd as testaments of genius — and she eventually discovers that Lucy was a famous coffee-table book photographer who mysteriously dropped out.
There’s the movie’s first problem: Lucy is supposed to be a legendary artist, a specialist in urban photo-realism, like Larry (“Kids”) Clark. But the photos we see here — lyrical portraits actually shot by Cholodenko’s long-time friend Jojo Whilden — hardly reveal the genius and stature the movie attributes to Lucy. We may wonder why both Syd and her normally blase “Frame” editors — snotty Harry (David Thornton) and Andy Warhol “Interview” veteran Dominique (Anh Duong) — are in such a tizzy. And, when Syd gets Lucy a “Frame” cover portfolio assignment, and fragile Lucy consents, we may wonder if she’s up to delivering.
Syd wants to save Lucy, but she also wants to advance her own career. Lucy just wants to sleep with Syd: a desire that may wreck Lucy’s little world. Being with Syd endangers Lucy’s drug habit, her affair with decadently over-the-hill Greta (an ex-actress in R.W. Fassbinder films), and, most of all, her own subsidized torpor. (Lucy is no impoverished genius but a rich heiress with a trust fund and a nosy patrician mother, played by Tammy Grimes.) So, when the creepy “Frame” editors set a ridiculously near and tight deadline, Lucy begins to sink out of control, sex rears up — and the stage is obviously set for tragedy at worst and rude awakenings at best. Cholodenko doesn’t disappoint us.
Shot in languorously long takes and a studied atmosphere of raw intimacy, this is obviously a film hankering for a personal vision, after the example of great European directors like Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Fassbinder. Like Syd, Cholodenko keeps dropping names — not just Fassbinder’s or Andy Warhol’s, but those mainstays of current academic critical theory, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whom Syd mentions as her big scholarly influences.
Much as I liked Clarkson, I couldn’t believe her as a Fassbinder actress. And I have a sneaking hunch Kristeva, Derrida and Foucault are there to establish Cholodenko’s intellectual credentials. The scenes at the “Frame” office lack even the superficial camaraderie visible in every alternative L.A. or New York City magazine or journal I’ve worked for or visited. And the scenes with Lucy’s patrician mother are stiff and full of attitude.
“High Art” won Cholodenko the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, but I don’t think it’s really a well-written movie. What I liked instead were the sometime naked intensity of the performances and the raw intimacy of the camera style.
Though Clarkson’s Greta strikes me as ersatz, she’s the film’s most entertaining player. (Bill Sage as the bizarre, clean-cut, doper hanger-on Arnie runs her a close second.) Clarkson has a delightfully Marlene Dietrich-esque slurry, throaty purr, and her languid movements suggest that she’s struggling out of a coma or collapsing into life as if it were a messy but comfortable bed.
Sheedy’s performance is interesting, too: I wish I’d liked it more. In the 1980s, in her so-called Brat Pack years — with Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson and the rest of the gang — young Sheedy had a smile to warm your heart and a fresh-faced, breezy energy that suggested cloudless days and walks on the beach. She was either a cheerleader or a class cutup in films like “War Games” or “The Breakfast Club,” but here, that youthful radiance seems to have been sucked out of her. Looking thin, drawn and movingly unguarded, she plays Lucy Berliner as someone who’s given up on both art and life.
It’s a very brave performance, but the script defeats her. Cholodenko doesn’t create real enough characters because she’s too busy explaining what they mean, where they are, how they exemplify or reveal political positions and, perhaps, how they might be interpreted by somebody like Derrida or Foucault. Straining for raw emotion, reality and social criticism, the movie collapses into the usual commerce vs. art, deviance vs. normality cliches. Her first time out, Cholodenko — who will probably make much better films — is a little too analytical in her storytelling. Just like Syd, she’d be better off avoiding the traps of theory, and just living it.
”HIGH ART”
(star) (star)
Directed and written by Lisa Cholodenko; photographed by Tami Reiker; edited by Amy E. Duddleston; production designed by Bernhard Blythe; music by Shudder to Think; produced by Dolly Hall, Jeff Levy-Hinte, Susan A. Stover. An October Films release; opens Friday at the Fine Arts. Running time: 1:41. MPAA rating: R (language, sensuality, nudity, violence).
THE CAST
Lucy Berliner ……… Ally Sheedy
Syd ………………. Radha Mitchell
Greta …………….. Patricia Clarkson
James …………….. Gabriel Mann
Arnie …………….. Bill Sage
Vera ……………… Tammy Grimes
