GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JULY 10, 1998

Evenings Out

A dark look into the New York art world

High Art

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko October Films

Reviewed by Doreen Cudnik

It was the winner of the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize, and all the rage at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Critics worldwide are using words like "absorbing,” “superb," and "stunning" to describe High Art, a film starring Radha Mitchell and Ally Sheedy in a role that will definitely make you forget her as the weird girl in The Breakfast Club.

Radha Mitchell is Syd, an assistant editor at the trendy New York photography magazine Frame. Although she's been given the title of editor, she is still relegated to making sandwich and coffee runs for the snobbish senior editors, and is just basically too nice a person to make any fuss about it.

She knows good art when she sees it, though, and when a leak in her bathroom ceiling sends her upstairs to find out the cause of the damage, she's confronted with some of the best photography she has seen in a long time.

The person responsible for the images is Lucy Berliner (Sheedy), who lives in the apartment with her lover Greta, an aging, hasbeen German film star, and a cast of characters who no doubt also consider themselves "artists," but spend most of their time hanging out at Lucy's, shooting and snorting heroin.

Lucy tells Syd she made a "mental health decision to stop doing commercial work" about ten years ago because she felt trapped as an artist. She is able to pay her rent and

finance her drug addiction due to her wealthy mother, a Holocaust survivor who doesn't know what is worse that her daughter is a lesbian, or that the woman Lucy lives with is German.

Syd is so mesmerized, not only by the photographs, but also by Lucy herself, that she tells the editors at Frame about her find. It turns out that Lucy was once an up-andcoming artist, but that she gave it all up and

a reason to want to get clean. Syd convinces Lucy to just meet with the Frame editors and consider doing commercial work again. Lucy does, and agrees to do a shoot for their next issue, but only if Syd is her editor.

As the two women's lives and work become more and more entangled, their present relationships begin to fall by the wayside. Threatened by her budding relationship with Lucy, Syd's live-in boyfriend James lashes

The love scenes are awkwardly real, and filled with authentic dialogue and emotion. When Syd tells Lucy, “I think I'm kind of in love with you," tears brimming in her eyes, you remember what it felt like to be there.

mysteriously disappeared from the New York art community. As one of the Frame editors puts it, "She gave the big 'fuck you' to everyone who helped her come up."

Syd keeps finding excuses to go upstairs and hang out with Lucy and the others. The two share their passion for art, and as a result, their attraction to each other becomes stronger. Syd is drawn to Lucy's raw talent as an artist and her cool detachment. Syd's sweetness and drive to succeed begins to rub off on Lucy, and she begins to become more and more annoyed with the constantly strungout Greta and her user friends.

"You guys are so glamorous," Lucy says sarcastically as she watches her friends shoot up during a party. Fact is, Lucy's a junkie

too, although Syd gives her

66

out at her about her "power job," her 'hipster friends" and all the access into the art world that she now enjoys, which he sees as pretentious and meaningless.

Meanwhile, Greta has labeled Syd a "bootlicker and a parasite," and tells Lucy, "She's a poser, I don't know what you see in her," all while caretaker Lucy is nursing her back to health after a bad high, and cleaning up the mess in the apartment from yet another party.

All of that takes a back seat as the two women drive to upstate New York to do the shoot. Syd's a little concerned when she realizes that Lucy has no real plan in mind,

and the deadlines for the Frame assignment are closing in fast. But Syd's not only there to act as Lucy's editor, and the two women finally consummate their relationship.

The love scenes are awkwardly real, and filled with authentic dialogue and emotion. When Syd tells Lucy, "I think I'm kind of in love with you," tears brimming in her eyes, you remember what it felt like to be there. Later, when Lucy turns in her project for Frame—all of them photographs from the weekend with Syd-she says, "They wanted me to examine my life-well this is it—I'm thinking of you."

There's no doubt at that point that she's going to free herself of Greta and the drugs and all that she has known up to that point and become Syd's famous photographer lover. But heroin can be a tricky loverand nothing is quite so simple in the world of high art.

Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko does a wonderful job examining the fluid nature of sexual orientation in this film. While High Art will undoubtedly attract substantial numbers of lesbian filmgoers, the strength of the story itself, as well as excellent acting by the ensemble cast-most notably Sheedy-will make it a hit with mainstream film audiences as well.

High Art is currently playing in Columbus at the Drexel East Theater, and at the Esquire Theater in Cincinnati. It opens in Cleveland on July 10 at the Cedar-Lee Theater.

During one of her lover's parties, Lucy (Ally Sheedy, right) falls into bed with Syd (Radha Mitchell).