(Lisa Cholodenko, USA, 1998, 101 minutes)
Every time I see your face
It reminds me of the places we used to go
But all I've got is a photograph
And I realise you're not comin' back anymore
--Ringo Starr, "Photograph" (1973)
High Art is either the best or the worst title Lisa Cholodenko could have chosen for her debut feature. On the one hand, it's accurate, since she set her story in the world of fine art photography and prestige publishing.
On the other hand, it's also a cruel joke, since by high she means, well, high, and most of the characters in her film are stoned out of their minds.
Our entry into this rarified world is through Syd (smooth-faced 21-year-old Australian actress Radha Mitchell with a credible American accent), who isn't a druggie, but a young woman--somewhat new to the city, like the Los Angeleno director--who's open to novel experiences. She works at a New York photography journal called Frame, and she's just been promoted from an intern to an assistant editor.
It sounds like a step up, but that isn't exactly the case. There's no raise, and she's still expected to fetch coffee for her condescending superiors (played by model and artist Anh Duong and Office Killer's James Thornton), but now they're more likely to listen to her ideas, and she's desperate to be heard.
In the conversation with Karyn Kusama included with the new Criterion Collection release, Cholodenko admits she put a lot of herself into Syd.
(Beyond the fact that they're longtime friends, Kusama's brother-in-law, Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte, produced High Art. He would go on to produce Laurel Canyon and The Kids Are All Right, which took inspiration from Cholodenko's family life with Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin of Wendy and Lisa.)
It isn't a very flattering self portrait, though Mitchell plays Syd not as a victim or a villain, but as an over-educated, if painfully naïve striver. In college, she studied critical theory, and she inelegantly punctuates her conversation with academic terminology.
Syd shares a bunker-like apartment in Williamsburg with her boyfriend (Revenge's Gabriel Mann, also a model), who seems to think they have a good thing, but that changes when someone more compelling comes along. Cholodenko wrote James as a chef, but decided to leave that out of the film. It's an interesting detail, but it isn't necessary to explain their dynamic.
Syd (who lacks a last name) meets Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy, who told the director she also saw a lot of herself in her character) when she notices a leak above the tub. She knocks on the door of the loft above, and a thin, androgynous figure answers the door. From the look in both women's eyes, it's clear that each finds the other intriguing. It isn't love at first sight--in fact, it's a little uncomfortable--but there's definitely a spark of something.
Though Syd could have contacted the superintendent, he isn't known for the fastest response time, hence her more direct approach, which Lucy appears to respect, since she doesn't hesitate to lead Syd toward the bathroom. On the way, they pass her black leather-clad girlfriend, Greta (Patricia Clarkson with a smoky-sleepy German accent), splayed across the couch.
Greta barely reacts, but the way she looks at Syd--who had interrupted a moment of intimacy--is anything but welcoming, and there's no reason it should be. A slightly older, but still sultry actress, the permanently unemployed Greta sponges off her girlfriend, who hails from a wealthy Jewish family (theater actress Tammy Grimes, Christopher Plummer's ex-wife, plays Lucy's perpetually disappointed mother), but that doesn't mean the two women don't love each other, and that's the problem. The baggage tied to that love spells possible doom: drug addiction, lack of ambition, co-dependence.
In a way, it's almost as if they've been waiting for someone like Syd to come along to break up their comfortable, if monotonous routine, which can't continue indefinitely. At the very least, they've made themselves vulnerable to the influence of a young, sensuous, hyper-ambitious interloper.
To Cholodenko's credit, however, she doesn't spell any of this out. Her plugged-in cast suggests all of these things, though Sheedy's Lucy holds her cards closest to her chest and gives away the least, which may be why she received a disproportionate--though not undeserving--share of the praise, even as most everything plays out from Syd's perspective, and from today's vantage point, Mitchell deserves more credit than she got in 1998.
It can't have been an easy role to play, since Syd can be pretty unlikable, and though the dialogue fits the scenario, it isn't what moved me so much as the way the characters, Syd and Lucy above all, look at each other.
Considering that this was Cholodenko's first feature, she could be forgiven for extraneous exposition, except there isn't any. I suspect she pared the dialogue down during production, since she never explains more than necessary, to the extent that even she admits, in the interview with Kusama, that the ending is more ambiguous than she intended, because she knows what happens and why, but doesn't show it--only the before and after.
Meanwhile, though, there's a leak, which Syd traces to the floorboards under the tub in which Greta likes to soak for as long as she can--a propensity which leads to the film's most harrowing sequence. (Syd, by contrast, likes to read in her tub, not drift off to oblivion.) Later, she returns to plug the hole, and that isn't a sexual reference, although I can't say what was on Cholodenko's mind when she devised this excuse to bring two people together who might not otherwise meet, despite their physical proximity.
Every other time Syd drops by the loft, Lucy and Greta are joined by louche hangers-on played by Bill Sage, Sarita Choudhury, and friends of the director draped across the furniture like deflated clocks in a Dalí painting.
If the leak was the extent of that first encounter, the situation might not advance much further, except Syd notices the photographs of friends and lovers on the walls, asks Lucy about them and startles to find that she took them. Syd thinks they're fantastic, and explains why in grad student-like terms. When Lucy quips, "I haven't been deconstructed in a long time," it sounds as much like a statement of fact as as a joke at Syd's expense as a sly come on.
Though several photographers inspired the character of Lucy, namely Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, and though 16 photographers contributed to the film, JoJo Whilden, co-producer Susan Stover's partner, took Lucy's photographs.
Fittingly, Goldin would get her own starring role in Laura Poitras's Oscar-nominated 2022 documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which traces the links between her art and activism, since Goldin channeled her fury at the friends, lovers, and photography subjects lost to opioid addiction into a successful campaign to stop the Sackler family from using art institutions to pinkwash Purdue Pharma's fraud and deception (unlike Lucy, Goldin struggled with and overcame addictions to fentanyl and Oxycontin).
Right: Nan Goldin as seen by Nan Goldin in 1998
Lucy neither deflects nor basks in Syd's ostentatious praise, explaining that photography is something she used to do, and still does, but she "stopped doing industry work a decade ago" for mental health reasons.
Cholodenko implies that the only thing compelling Lucy's art is the act of photographing, which makes her a true artist, but in the real world, artists need shelter, medical care, and other quotidian, if life-sustaining elements, except her mother has enabled her to avoid paid work, sellout or otherwise, and infantilized her so completely she can't imagine living any other way.
Concerns about selling out persist, and always will, but they reached a fever pitch in the 1990s as major labels went on a feeding frenzy to sign as many independent acts as they could, and fans accused many of them of selling out, not least when they cleaned up their image, made videos for MTV, and appeared in the sorts of glossy print pictorials that could pay Lucy's bills dozens of times over, except her sensibility would never allow for it.
Granted, Cholodenko makes no direct reference to any of these acts or the so-called heroin chic associated with Calvin Klein's unisex CK One campaign, or closer to home, the "lesbian milieu," to quote B. Ruby Rich's Criterion essay, of the East Village, even as she built her film around these 1990s concepts, though filtered through a 1970s aesthetic, which extends to Shudder to Think's glass harp-like score, which is never overtly psychedelic or somnambulant, but frequently hazy and appropriately spiky when it needs to be, much like Tami Reiker's warm, 35mm cinematography.
In her interview, Cholodenko cites Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, which I can kind of see, though Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Kant, a claustrophobic all-woman chamber piece, makes more sense, particularly since Cholodenko wrote Greta as a one-time Fassbinder player who can't stop referencing a tremendous talent who succumbed to his own excesses (later in the film when Lucy wants to hurt her, she spits, "Fassbinder is dead, Greta!"). Plus, all of the women in the film eschew foundation garments, which brings '70s films like Klute to mind…among hundreds of others from the burn-the-bra era.
Consequently, Cholodenko also avoids pop songs, celebrity imagery, and the like. Whether or not she was aiming for timelessness, she comes closer than most other 1990s films, with the exception of Cindy Sherman's Office Killer, another 1998 independent feature from a female first-timer--also set at a New York publication--which killed Sherman's directorial career in an instant, but at least she had something to fall back on: fine art photography.
And fine art photography drives Syd, though Lucy becomes her other great passion. It's just that the two become inseparable, and that's never a good thing, especially when drugs are involved.
Though it isn't clear, when she sees them for the first time, if Syd can tell that Lucy and her associates are strung out rather than just relaxed, she doesn't hesitate to try a line when Lucy offers (it's possible she thought it was coke). And though a needle appears toward the end, Cholodenko avoids most of the tropes associated with heroin, preventing High Art from becoming just another addiction drama, though Syd's attraction to Lucy plays like a form of addiction.
Since Cholodenko introduces Syd with a boyfriend, she initially scans as straight, though she may have already had relationships with women or has at least considered the possibility, and I wouldn't blame anyone for describing the film as a queer coming-out story, whether that means she's lesbian or bisexual, not least since Cholodenko is lesbian and has often made films centering on lesbian characters, though straight women, like Mitchell and Sheedy and Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right (below), have often played these lesbian characters.
It's reasonable to assume Syd realizes she likes women the minute she sees one she likes, but I believe she sparks to Lucy because she sparks to Lucy.
She doesn't know, for instance, that Lucy is a photographer, but once she does, her attraction morphs into something more ambiguous, but just as powerful, because Lucy isn't only a potential lover, but a career opportunity, and not just any career opportunity, but one that could make her name.
We often think of heroin addicts, like Greta--who has it worse than Lucy--as users, because they are. Not just users of the drug itself, but vampiric creatures who will do whatever it takes to feed their hunger--pun intended. Without Lucy, Greta might have to try acting again, but with her, she doesn't have to. As Neil Tennant once sang, "But look at my hopes, look at my dreams, the currency we've spent, I love you, you pay my rent" (Derek Jarman directed the video). And just as Lucy and Greta seem to genuinely care about each other, the same becomes true of Syd and Lucy, but that doesn't mean they aren't using each other.
Connection established, Syd tells Anh Duong's Dominique, the chief editor, and James Thornton's Harry, her immediate superior, about Lucy, except they've already heard of her--Syd doesn't know as much as she thinks she does. To them, Lucy is a photographer of some talent who disappeared 10 years ago, and they haven't heard a thing about her since. They certainly don't know whether she still has the goods, and they aren't especially interested, but they agree to humor Syd if she can bring them a book.
So, Syd asks Lucy if she has a book, and she produces a well worn copy for her to show her employers, though she doesn't share Syd's enthusiasm, and Cholodenko doesn't explains her openness, after a brief period of resistance, to Syd's entreaties, but she's certainly curious and possibly bemused. Mostly, her life has gotten stale, and Syd has awakened something in her.
As Syd hangs out with Lucy, Greta, and their friends, she inhales more heroin, and this confluence of events drives a wedge between her and James, who becomes a bit of a whiner, though I wouldn't be thrilled if my partner started hanging out with heroin addicts either, no matter how chic.
Greta, similarly, tolerates Syd's presence, but would prefer to have nothing to do with her. As she tells her early on, "I live for Lucy" before quickly correcting herself to say, "I mean, I live here with Lucy," and though Clarkson's interpretation of this faded glamor gal brings coquettish humor to an otherwise solemn film, in that moment: she's deadly serious.
Syd should take it as a warning, and it is, but she doesn't, and not because Greta is vindictive, but because she can see which way the wind is blowing. She may seem like she's out of it more often than not--to the extent that she nods off at restaurants--but Clarkson plays her as a woman of perception and intelligence who hasn't let drugs completely addle her brain.
Fortunately for Syd, Dominique and Harry are sufficiently taken with Lucy's decade-old work to give her a shot at the cover, but if she can't produce a new series worthy of publication, they have Dieter, a male photographer on deck, happy to give them what they need, so Syd can't fuck it up, or they may never listen to her ideas again. It's possible they might even fire her.
No one actually says that, but the threat hangs in the air, exacerbated by the fact that receptionist Debby (model Charis Michelsen) often peppers Syd with questions--Cholodenko suggests that she's eager to take her place.
Beyond the fact that Frame gives Lucy the go-ahead, she in turn insists that Syd, and not Harry, the journal's editor, fills that role. Otherwise, she'll walk, so they accede to her demand. I'm not sure they believe their lowly assistant can actually pull it off, but it's a gift Lucy doesn't have to give, and yet she does so freely.
Little time has passed. Syd still lives with James, Lucy still lives with Greta, and no one has agreed to an open relationship, so Syd and Lucy are cheating on their partners. When the two arrange to go upstate for the weekend, so that Syd can oversee Lucy's photo shoot, Cholodenko sets the scene for everything to blow up in ways either wonderful or terrible.
In the days before they leave, Lucy gives every indication she's ready for a different kind of life, one without the needy lover, the domineering mother, or even the clingy friends, like Bill Camp's Arnie--who's as hospitable to Syd as Greta--and this cool customer starts to make her dissatisfaction known.
Lucy even stops doing drugs when Syd asks, but Cholodenko never spells out exactly what she wants, and it's among the film's biggest strengths. I didn't need to know, other than that it isn't fame or riches, and that Syd allows her to imagine a possible, if not completely preferable alternative.
This was a first-time watch for me, and a second when I listened to Cholodenko's 2004 commentary track, so I didn't know what would happen at the end, and I won't spoil it for anyone else, but she splits the difference between wonderful and terrible (by contrast, I watched Laurel Canyon, The Kids Are All Right, and the excellent Netflix series Unbelievable upon their original release). I wasn't sure whether the director would pull it off, but for the most part, she does, though a second watch went a long way.
Robert Altman used to say that films don't end; they just have stopping points. That means if the filmmaker creates a truly compelling character--and if they don't die--you can imagine a future for them, because they'll go on after they make their last appearance. By High Art's conclusion, Syd appears changed; less naïve, but also less hopeful. It's possible she's straight, it's possible she's gay, it's possible she'll become another Dominique, and it's also possible she'll abandon photography altogether.
Going forward, I would hope she treads more carefully before inserting herself into another person's life for professional gain. Just because Lucy lets her in doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make it completely wrong either.
It's more that Syd can't or won't see the whole picture; she can only imagine a future in which she returns Lucy to art world prominence and goes on to discover more talents she can exploit. After all, she isn't the artist, and it's unlikely she ever will be, no matter how close she gets to one.
High Art is out now on The Criterion Collection in a new 4K edition including a richly contextual essay from B. Ruby Rich, new interviews with Radha Mitchell, Ally Sheedy and JoJo Whilden, and Lisa Cholodenko's 1997 short film, Dinner Party, featuring Sarita Choudhury. Images from the IMDb (Mitchell, Sheedy, Patricia Clarkson, and Bill Camp), Rotten Tomatoes (Lisa Cholodenko), Amazon (Mitchell and Gabriel Mann), The Film Experience (Clarkson), Fraenkel Gallery (Nan Goldin, Self-portrait in the mirror, Hotel Baur, Zürich, 1998), CaFleurBon (CK One ad), and The Guardian / Cinetext /Allstar Collection / Focus Features (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore).
