Word: cholodenko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
High Art, the new film from first-time writer-director Lisa Cholodenko, certainly aims high but still isn't quite art. In fact, who knows what to make of a film whose primary virtue, together with the quality of its acting, is the scale of its ambition, yet which grows in plot and theme more and more critical of ambition? This narrative dilemma, rather than weakening Cholodenko's film, actually gives it structure and power, sustaining High Art through occasional lapses in its storytelling and making of it an intriguing if not wholly successful picture...
...after another late night at the office, lounging with a photo journal in her bathtub, where she notices that a pipe from the apartment immediately upstairs from hers has sprung a leak through her ceiling. Cholodenko, whose script won the Screenwriting Award at this spring's Sundance Film Festival, is nonetheless more than willing to throw in a few unlikely convolutions--the landlord doesn't answer his phone (apparently for days), Syd has a way with a wrench and some duct tape--to shuttle her protagonist into the upstairs den of depraved sophistication where her story will take...
...Thus, Cholodenko has already situated Greta and Lucy precariously on the edge of a break-up when Syd comes knocking, tools in hand, asking to tinker with Lucy's pipes. "Are you running a bath?" Syd asks Lucy as the latter opens the door. "Nobody here has taken a bath in several days," Lucy confesses, the fog of heroin so thick in her brain that her words sound like underwater utterances. Syd, however, is too instantly fascinated by the photographs hung around the apartment, many of them of Greta, that she doesn't seem to notice most of the hangers...
...High Art, by contrast, scores aces for slinky atmosphere but overdoes the seriousness, offering a somber, compellingly seedy, but occasionally lethargic story where the sexual roundabouts that "shock" its various characters are rarely if ever shocking to us. By the time Lucy's saddled with a cartoonish Jewish mother, Cholodenko seems as starved for inspiration as Great and Lucy are demonstrated...
Sheedy's performance maintains an incredible level of focus and emotion, a feat that High Art itself does not manage to copy. For one, the last chapter of the film involves a descent into sentiment that nothing in the rest of the picture prepares us for. Moreover, Cholodenko falls into her own writerly trap just as Neil LaBute did in last year's In the Company of Man: her escalating interest in her story's allegorical conflicts of Work, Love, and Ambition bleed all the initial power from an emotionally explosive scenario...