Word: cholodenko
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Dates: during 1998-1998
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...Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters stars Ian McKellen in a parable about '30s Hollywood director James Whale (Frankenstein, Show Boat). Like Billy, he is consumed with sexual longing, but here it is the ultimate form of masochism: a desire to be killed. The erotic charge sizzles in Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, a pensive throwback to the drug-and-sex angst of the '70s. It tosses Ally Sheedy into heavy, fraught clinches with Patricia Clarkson and Radha Mitchell. (Mitchell: "It's hot in here." Sheedy...
...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...
...High Art shares In the Company of Men's tendencies toward pretension and detachment, it also recalls its Sundance precursor for its literate dialogue, nuanced portrayals and admirable breadth of vision. Cholodenko would have done well to decide early on if her film was about three women artists or about Art as embodied in three women; her title implies a closer sympathy with the broader, less intimate project. all the same, Sheedy and Cholodenko especially more than prove their mettle, giving us hope that their talents and potential will come to fuller flower than the story suggests is possible. Like...