HIGH ART

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko

Starring Radha Mitchell, Ally Sheedy, Patricia Clarkson

Playing at Kendall Square Cinema

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.

The central figure in High Art is Syd (Radha Mitchell), a newly-promoted assistant editor at a modish New York photography magazine called *Frame*. Syd is a hard worker and has a keen eye, but because her superiors have yet to fill the intern position she vacated for her editorship, she is currently working absurd hours trying to do both jobs. Her boyfriend Steve (Gabriel Mann) laments what he considers her exploitation by the *Frame* staff, but Syd, confident that her dedication will push her up through the editorial ranks, has no complaints. "I'm trying to stick up for you," Steve insists. "Why?" Syd asks. "No one's bullying me."

Cut to Syd, 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 off.

This combination flop-house/speak-easy is the residence of two women who once gave themselves entirely over to art: Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a German actress whose career took a dive after the death of Fassbinder, and Lucy (Ally Sheedy), a photographer of stunning, decadent portraits who abandoned her promising career to accompany Greta further and further into their shared black forest of drugs and sex. The women are still attached to each other, lustful and desperate but still, it seems on some level, inspired by each other's sensitive nature and past artistic achievements. Unfortunately, both women invested so much of themselves in their craft, and both have flushed so much of their residual income on booze and narcotics, that the reserves of vitality and feeling left in either woman are too depleted to carry the relationship much longer.

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-on snorting and smoking in Lucy's living room, nor is she put off by Lucy's hazy demeanor. She enthuses about the spontaneity of Lucy's photos, not immediately recognizing that Lucy is the photographer, and quickly embarrassed by her own florid appraisal. "Am I going off?" she nervously asks her neighbor.

"No," Lucy answers, "I just haven't been deconstructed in a while."

As anyone who has ever seen a movie featuring a plumber already knows, Syd's attraction to Lucy will prove to have far more facets than mere aesthetic appreciation. Or in other words, aesthetic appreciation is still a big part of Syd's reaction to Lucy, but not just in terms of her photographs. Cinema, as we survey other recent releases like Alan Rudolph's Afterglow and the Wachowski Brothers' Bound, is perhaps the last cultural realm where working as a plumber guarantees for an individual immediate and intense sexual gratification; this unfailing phenomenon is even more surprising when held against sitcom plumbers, who mostly appear as overweight white guys who score cheap laughs when their butts poke out from the waistlines of their jeans.

High Art doesn't have the humor or the steely self-assurance of Bound, a razor-sharp thriller/campfest that acknowledged the clichéd phoniness of shorthanding a woman's skill with bathroom pipes as an instant flag of lesbian sexuality. 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 to be.

All of that said, however, High Art grabs our interest early and holds our attention almost throughout. The almost hypnotic effect of the picture springs partly from the rich, percussive soundtrack composed by Shudder To Think, but more credit belongs to the trio of actresses at the center of the narrative. Mitchell has the largest role, and she nicely manages the role of the seeming innocent drawn so far into this circle of sirens that her presence creates tensions felt by the whole group. Clarkson impresses mightily as Greta, whose mordant wit is an obvious retort to a life and a lover she feels have abandoned her.

However strong these women's performances, however, it's Sheedy--and who ever thought this sentence was possible?--who holds the picture together. The one-time co-star of The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire reads on paper as the recognizable name in a sea of unknowns, but so soundly yet unflamboyantly does she shatter her John Hughes image that she's no more recognizable than her colleagues. Sheedy centers her performance in the depth and movement of her eyes, a savvy decision when playing a top-flight photographer, but also an apt register of how carefully Lucy tries to be in negotiating the re-entry into fame that Syd had mapped out for her in the pages of Frame. Is Syd romancing Lucy merely to secure a career coup, or is it vice versa--the magazine deal as an attractive bait for what is fundamentally an erotic seduction?

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.

In the end, if 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 Sheedy's Lucy, Cholodenko will do great things with her camera once she learns a few brisk lessons in discipline and control.