While watching High Art, you can’t help but imagine this is what happened when Ally Sheedy’s Allison from The Breakfast Club grew up. Having disappeared for several years after being part of the infamous “Brat Pack” in the 80s, Sheedy returns with a new maturity, and super-cool indie cred by choosing the impressive High Art for her “comeback” role as drugged-out photographer Lucy Berliner.
Cherub-faced Radha Mitchell plays Syd, an assistant editor at a high-falutin’ photo magazine in New York City. She desperately wants to move up the career ladder, and ends up getting an unexpected boost when she discovers that upstairs from the apartment she and her boyfriend share lives reclusive, once-hot photographer Lucy Berliner (Sheedy). Lucy dropped off the radar 10 years earlier when she couldn’t take the New York hipster art scene anymore and moved to Berlin. When Syd meets Lucy (when she is trying to find the source of water dripping through the ceiling from Lucy’s apartment), she falls into the world of the glamorous (to her), yet washed-up New York druggie-artist lifestyle.
Lucy lives with her lover Greta (Patricia Clarkston, who is an absolute hoot), a German actress who name-drops about her days working with director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (though he’s been dead for years). Their friends, a motley crew of slow-moving beautiful aging hipsters, are constantly adorning their apartment, snorting heroin, sprawling on couches in the background. Syd enters this world wide-eyed and naïve, not only falling for Lucy, but for the lifestyle that she represents. Of course, she is in completely over her head, which she realizes after she has become too involved.
Ally Sheedy is excellent. I hope her emaciated look was just for this role—her Lucy is pencil-thin, gaunt, and pale… a wasted druggie. When lively Syd enters her life, you can see a spark re-light from within, but even she realizes it is probably too little too late. Her life has made her cynical and jaded; her body language in certain scenes is the ultimate brush-off to puppy-dog Syd’s needy affection. The interplay between Sheedy and Mitchell is riveting and believable—the difference between a life of experience, and a life wanting experience.
High Art (yes, there is a double-meaning in the title) portrays a lot of drug use… a lot. So if you are at all squeamish about seeing people snorting powder into their noses in every other scene, it may not be the movie for you. If you can handle that though, High Art is well worth seeing. The photography is beautiful (both the photos in the movie, and the cinematography itself), the soundtrack by band Shudder to Think is haunting, and the acting is all-around excellent.
