Photo finish

High Art smacks of real life

by Peter Keough

HIGH ART. Directed and written by Lisa Cholodenko. With Ally Sheedy, Radha Mitchell, Patricia Clarkson, Gabriel Mann, Bill Sage, Anh Duong, Tammy Grimes, and David Thornton. An October Films release.

At the Avon.

First-time director Lisa Cholodenko's High Art confronts with subtlety, wit, and passion the complex and interrelated issues surrounding the title concept. In a time when the mystery and the transcendence of the creative process are scoffed at and the hegemony of commercialization and compromise is a given, Art dares to take its subject seriously. Not that it's without a sense of humor; Cholodenko and her cast demonstrate a bittersweet, elegant irony as they explore the turmoil that arises when genius, love, and venality collide. Although occasionally schematic, High Art for the most part imitates life with shrewdness and inspiration.

Syd (Radha Mitchell), a young, squeaky-clean assistant editor at Frame, a chi-chi Manhattan photography magazine, seems ill-equipped to deal with the mean suites of the big city. The sleek ruthlessness of her profession becomes evident when she's asked by the magazine's career-climbing receptionist (who, ominously, is reading a copy of Crime and Punishment), how she got her job. Syd mentions her degree in art and her study of Barthes and Lacan, but such theory is no preparation for the snakepit of hypocrisy and self-seeking she's fallen into.

Immediate superior Harry (played with smarmy charm by David Thornton) sends her out for coffee and takes credit for her ideas. Dominique (Anh Duong), the imposing editor (and a former receptionist), suffers no illusions about ethics or aesthetics when it comes to nurturing the publication's demographic. Syd maneuvers herself meekly about this treacherous environment with equal parts idealism and opportunism. Back at home, her impossibly whitebread boyfriend, James (Gabriel Mann, who seems like James Spader's blander younger brother), offers tepid encouragement and blandishments against her selling herself short along with the cocktail he whips up when she returns after putting in extra hours.

This precarious world springs a leak when water drips from Syd's bathroom ceiling while she's soaking in the tub. Checking on the source in the apartment upstairs, she steps into a chic den of iniquity, with smug druggies, languid lesbians, poseurs, hangers-on, and artists. It's the salon of Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), a former photography phenom whose meteoric rise came to a self-imposed end when she turned to solitude, heroin, and a dead-end affair with Fassbinder casualty Greta (an entertaining Patricia Clarkson, doing Nico by way of Petra von Kant). Syd's intrigued as much by Lucy's prints hanging on the walls (Larry Clark and Nan Goldin knockoffs by JoJo Whilden) as by the allure of unconventional sex and illicit drugs sprawled on her threadbare furniture.

Poor James hasn't a chance against Lucy's feral intensity -- Sheedy's performance is fierce, taut, and incandescent -- and soon Syd is spending a lot of time in her neighbor's apartment, and not looking for leaks. A bonus is that her employers are eager to land the legendary Lucy for a cover story about her new work. To the dismay of James and the bitter tears of Greta, who warns Lucy her new flirtation is a parasite, the two drift into a shaky love and business relationship.

That the sources of Lucy's inspiration -- angst, addiction, and anarchy -- are antithetical to her new patrons becomes clear in a painful lunch meeting, and Syd is put in the difficult situation of choosing between loyalty and ambition, integrity and compromise. Cholodenko takes no sides, allowing her characters to fend for themselves. Sheedy transforms the cliché of the suffering artist into etiolated flesh-and-blood pathos; she's both charismatic and annoying as hell. Initially callow and superficial, Mitchell's Syd deepens enough to redeem, at least in part, the film's somewhat pat, melodramatic climax.

Notwithstanding that it critiques the pop-cultural glitzing of pain for profit, High Art is shot in a breezy, airbrushed style worthy of the hacks it parodies. Even the seedy demi-monde has an unnervingly sunny look -- which sets off the darkness of the performances, however, and the troubling implications of the themes. Made by a director gifted more as an observer and ironist than as an original auteur, High Art may not attain the stature of its title, but it adds to our appreciation of art's paradoxes and perseverance.