In the indie movie boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, most movies about drugs had an abundance of style. You might even call it excess: Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas pushed depictions of drug use and addiction to their surrealist limit. Other films opted for a more realistic approach, like Rush or Light Sleeper, yet they included some crime element to make the film more palatable genre fare. High Art, the feature debut from writer and director Lisa Cholodenko, eschews an aggressive style in favor of something markedly more realistic and invested in the psychology of its characters. The film follows drug addicts in New York City – most of whom look hip and tragic – but stops short of glamorizing them. They appear tired and bored most of the time, and the only interesting thing that happens to any of them is when an outsider makes the mistake of thinking they might have interests beyond the next fix.
Nearly 25 years have passed since the film’s debut, so its milieu of young, pre-9/11 New Yorkers serves is an unintended anthropological snapshot of a bygone era. Radha Mitchell plays Syd, an editor at a glossy photo magazine, the kind that would appear on display coffee tables in fancy furniture stores. Educated and ambitious, Syd understands her inexperience is the biggest hurdle she faces toward advancement, but then she stumbles into an opportunity. She visits her upstairs neighbor Lucy (Ally Sheedy) to complain about a water leak, and discovers an apartment full of drugged-out bohemians. More importantly, Lucy is a semi-retired photographer, one who seemed on the cusp of greatness before abandoning the art world. Syd convinces her bosses they should do a cover story on Lucy, who only agrees if Syd can be her editor. Drugs and sexual tension complicate their professional relationship.
Lucy is not shy about her sexuality. She does not flaunt it to Syd, exactly, but instead lives in a hazy state where few boundaries exist among her friends and lovers. These lovers, including a German ex-movie star named Greta (Patricia Clarkson), are somewhat resistant to Syd simply because prying eyes obliterate the illusion of normalcy. There is a scene early in the film where Syd and her boyfriend James (Gabriel Mann) go to a party at Lucy’s, and Syd slowly realizes there is a party-within-the-party where the real action takes place. Cholodenko’s formal qualities add to the cumulative sense of immersion: her camera glides among Syd and the others, all of whom live in shabby/chic apartments that they come from money. In Lucy’s case, there is abundant wealth from her mother (Tammy Grimes) and key scenes where she and Syd spend time in Lucy’s country house. Each development complicates the character, and Sheedy’s note-perfect performance shows why Syd would find her so seductive.
High Art is an erotic film, although it does not have a lot of sex scenes. At least, not exactly. Cholodenko has little interest in the calisthenics of sex (i.e. who does what to whom), and instead lingers over the buildup of tension prior to that release. There is an early sex scene between Syd and James that suggests a mix of lust and routine, and the real intimacy is in the moments before they really get at it. That same attention is in the film’s most famous scene, wherein Lucy and Syd sleep together. We already know that Syd has never been with a woman, and she is nervous about what exactly they must do together, so Lucy functions as something between a lover and a coach. Again, Cholodenko has no desire to make her film especially lurid, but because her film considers the emotional demands of sex in a realistic way, it depicts actual intimacy in a way that eludes most American films.
Drugs and art are also key component of Lucy and Syd’s time in the country house. Syd is the sort who will casually take a bump of cocaine when she’s offered, but she stops short of heroin, the preferred drug of Lucy and her roommates. There are halfhearted attempts to get sober, or maybe become semi-functional, but Lucy needs another transgression to fill that void. To that end, Lucy decides that Syd will be her subject for the photo magazine. This presents an intriguing moral and ethical dilemma: it is undeniably salacious that an editor would also pose as a model – Mitchell’s youth and good looks help in that department – and yet she also has her career to consider. Will Syd be taken seriously after posing for some seminude portraits? What about James? Mitchell’s performance is more reactive than Sheedy’s, a mix of naivete and determination, qualities that add grim irony to the inevitable final passages.
The addicts in High Art are careful not to get too attached anymore. What’s the point? They see the outside world as the inauthentic one, talking about it as if there is nothing there worth a damn. Greta likes to mention how she appeared in Fassbinder films, for example, a fact that amounts to an inconvenient excuse for not sticking her neck out again. No one wants to admit they have real feelings or desires – their scene would deflate the moment that happens – except there is another external factor that ruins their protracted group hang. In a brusque scene, we learn along with Syd that Lucy succumbed to her addiction. She is told by Arnie (Bill Sage), perhaps the most sensible of the gang, but he barely gets the news out. He is too desperate to escape a milieu tarnished by death.
Addicts rarely escape their desires, or have some fate that drips with dramatic irony. Instead, they just sort of stop being around anymore, existing only in memories (or maybe photographs) that add a bittersweet sheen that never deserves such revisionism.
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