High Art
USA 1998
Reviewed by Leslie Felperin
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
New York City. Syd works at Frame, a photography magazine. At home one night with her boyfriend James, a leak in the bathroom leads Syd up to the flat of their neighbour Lucy, who's been snorting heroin with her live-in girlfriend Greta and their friends. Syd is bowled over by Lucy's photographs and later borrows a book of her work to show the editors at Frame. They explain that Lucy was once the hottest photographer in New York, but she turned her back on it all. At a meeting, Lucy agrees to do a spread for Frame as long as Syd has full editorial control.
A mutual attraction grows between Syd and Lucy. Syd tries some heroin at a party with Lucy, alienating James and making Greta jealous. Lucy insists Syd accompany her on a trip upstate. The two make love and in the morning Lucy takes intimate snaps of Syd in bed. Back in New York, Lucy considers leaving Greta and giving up heroin. She gives Syd the photos of their weekend, insisting Frame use them. Greta and Lucy fight about their relationship and then snort some heroin together; Lucy dies. Syd's image adorns the latest issue of Frame.
Review
"It's been a long time since I've been deconstructed," says a flattered Lucy Berliner after magazine assistant editor Syd raves about how Lucy's photographs illustrate a notion of Roland Barthes'. And it's been a long time since we've seen on screen so cerebral a seduction as Lucy's. It's to High Art's credit that it flirts so frankly and eschews using complicated visual accessories to lure us into the bedroom. Given the hip, quasi-intellectual demi-monde the film is set in, other film-makers might have been tempted to trick out the movie with retro new wave-style jump cuts or Warholian graininess. But Lisa Cholodenko (maker of the shorts Souvenir and Dinner Party) and cinematographer Tami Reiker confine themselves to coolly composed long takes and slow tracks richly lit. This suits what is after all a simple love-triangle story, and finds a correlative in Lucy's photographs (actually taken by JoJo Whilden) of her friends in various postures of loucheness, which Syd describes as striking a balance between formal composition and spontaneity. If Art Forum had a tabloid-style agony-aunt column with a photostory, it would look something like High Art.
Some of the other photographs used in the film are by Nan Goldin, and Lucy's snaps bear more than a passing resemblance to Goldin's confessional, lapidary portraits of herself and her bohemian friends. Inevitably, this has wrought accusations that the film has plagiarised Goldin's life, which seems a little unfair to both the film and Goldin, whose work has moved on from self-focus to more distinctly other subjects, including drag queens and hospices. Nonetheless, High Art does deal, perhaps with oblique criticism, with the 'cult of the artist's personality' culture that dominates a strain of 80s and 90s metropolitan chic. ("You guys are so glamorous," says Lucy to her friends as she watches them inject heroin.) The vampiric editorial crew at Syd's magazine Frame all but slobber when they find out Syd knows Lucy and push the latter to produce a spread based on her life at that moment, itching for the proximity frisson brought by her drug-culture lesbian cachet. Though sympathetically incarnated in Radha Mitchell's russet-and-honey figure, Syd gets to live out something of a star-fucking fantasy, albeit one for high-toned Ivy League girls.
Who can blame her when Ally Sheedy's Lucy is the fulcrum of that fantasy? Whip thin and kitted out in a selection of crisp hipster slacks, Sheedy oozes both the confident sexuality and brittle intelligence required for the role. Adding another spin to the film's thematic games with fame and reputation, her casting is an extra irony since Sheedy, like Lucy, also seemed to have slipped disappointingly from view since she became famous for The Breakfast Club. She holds the reins at the film's heart with confidence, leaving a wonderfully deadpan Patricia Clarkson, whose Greta once worked with "FAAAS-binder", to embody the bitterness of the wash-out.
Credits
- Producers
- Dolly Hall
- Jeff Levy-Hinte
- Susan A. Stover
- Screenplay
- Lisa Cholodenko
- Director of Photography
- Tami Reiker
- Editor
- Amy E. Duddleston
- Production Designer
- Bernhard Blythe
- Music
- Shudder to Think
- ©High Art Pictures, LLC
- Production Companies
- October Films presents
- in association with 391 a Dolly Hall production
- Associate Producer
- Lori E. Seid
- Production Office
Co-ordinator - Livia Monte
- Production Manager
- Exile Ramirez
- Location Manager
- Jeff Roth
- Post-production
Co-ordinator - Jennifer Ruff
- Assistant Directors
- Kelly McKaig
- Cecily Kaston
- Gwen Bialic
- Script Supervisor
- Molly Maguire
- Casting
- Directors:
- Billy Hopkins
- Suzanne Smith
- Kerry Barden
- Associates:
- Jennifer McNamara
- Mark Bennett
- Graphic Design
- Parlour
- Art Director
- Caryn Marcus
- Set Decorator
- Mechelle Chojecki
- Art Department
Co-ordinator - Sean De Simone
- 'Lucy Berliner' Photography
- JoJo Whilden
- 'Dieter' Portfolio Photography
- Lauren Sorokin
- FRAME Colour Photography
- Nina Berman
- Karen Crumley
- Exum
- Robert Flynt
- Nan Goldin
- Janine Gordon
- Liane Harris
- Brenda Ann Kenneally
- Ernest Montgomery
- Barbara Nitke
- Mark Peterson
- Jack Pierson
- Amy Steiner
- Robert Vizzini
- Costume Designer
- Victoria Farrell
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Anne Kenney
- Hair/Make-up Artist
- Mia Thoen
- Hair Style Consultant
- Dave Hickey
- Title Design
- Parlour
- Titles/Opticals
- Cynosure
- Shudder to Think
- Craig Wedren
- Nathan Larson
- Stuart Hill
- Music Supervisor
- Tracy McKnight
- Soundtrack
- "The Walk", "Cracktub", "Dominoes", "Gum Grinder", "Hot
- Gazpacho", "Battlesoaked (Remix)", "Fools" by Craig Wedren, performed by Shudder to Think; "Say, Buddy", "That's Fat", "B-Bird" by Shane Faber, De Harris, performed by The JeepJazz Project; "PH Balanced (For a Lady)", "She Might Be Waking Up" by Nathan Larson, performed by Shudder to Think; "The Gavial" by Jud Elvbar, performed by Reservoir
- Sound Design
- Damian Volpe
- Jonah Lawrence
- Audio Co-ordinator
- Stacey Weihe
- Production Sound Mixers
- Noah Timan
- Matt Armstrong
- Re-recording Mixer
- Rob Fernandez
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Tom Efinger
- Sound Editors
- Sonny Calderon
- Frank Egan
- Contributing Artists
- Jeff Carter
- Mechelle Chojecki
- Anne-Christine D'Adesky
- Peter Fay
- Daphne Fitzpatrick
- Jackie Hamilton
- Emily Krill
- Zoe Leonard
- Make Lu
- Carol Pavitt
- Michael Pirrocco
- Marja Samson
- Camilla Slattery
- David Wojnarowicz
- Suzanne Wright
- Cast
- Ally Sheedy
- Lucy Berliner
- Radha Mitchell
- Syd
- Tammy Grimes
- Vera Berliner, Lucy's mother
- Patricia Clarkson
- Greta Krauss, Lucy's girlfriend
- Gabriel Mann
- James, Syd's boyfriend
- Anh Duong
- Dominique Pujôt, FRAME editor
- Bill Sage
- Arnie
- David Thornton
- Harry, Syd's boss
- Rudolf Martin
- Dieter
- Charis Michelsen
- Debby
- Helen Mendes
- White Hawk
- Cindra Feuer
- Delia
- Anthony Ruivivar
- Xander
- Elaine Tse
- Zoe
- Laura Ekstrand
- waitress
- [uncredited]
- Sarita Choudhury
- Joan
- Stephen Gevedon
- man at party
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Blue Light
- 9,148 feet
- 101 minutes 39 seconds
- Ultra-Stereo
- Colour by
- Technicolor