A cellist has a mind-bending encounter on the New York subway in Nimic, a brief riff on the theme of The Double from Greek maestro Yorgos Lanthimos. Baffling and inviting in equal measure, it will delight die-hard Lanthimostans while easily alienating fans of conventional three-act structures. In any case, it shows what Lanthimos is capable of with smaller resources and only 11 minutes of runtime.
The film begins with dramatic music scoring Father (Matt Dillon) waking up next to his wife (Susan Elle) and eating breakfast with his children. The music stops and starts, quickly revealing the Father rehearsing an orchestral piece. This deliberate use of artificial music helps to set the tone for Nimic, which is all about artificiality of performance itself. After rehearsal, he takes the New York Subway. He asks a woman (Daphné Patakia) the time. She pauses, looking like a typically antisocial user of New York transit systems. Then she copies him: “Do you have the time?”
This is a deliberately repetitive movie, working like a piece of music itself, repeating brief poetic motifs — a boiling egg, a subway ride, a cello being played — at a smooth and intriguing rhythm. She is his mimic. She follows him. He goes home to the mother of his children and says: “Children please, tell your mother who their real father is.” The mimic repeats the same, and the children respond: “How should we know? We’re just kids.” To the average person, this should seem obvious, but in Yorgos’ world, it’s a deliberate provocation; asking us to question standard norms in favour of strangeness and paranoia.
For Lanthimos completists — who are more likely to seek the movie out than the average viewer — Nimic presents all of his usual tricks. The usual perspective distorting fish-eye lens is here, along with whip pans and lateral tracking shots. Actors in Yorgos Lanthimos films do not emote very much. Like in Kubrick, their deadpan faces are part of the theme itself; a reflection of a dystopian world where nothing makes sense. Circling upon itself with twisted glee, this is a concept that could conceivably go on forever, a kind of Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) for nihilists.
Perhaps the title can give us a clue, yet it seems to be another one of Lanthimos’ tricks. On first glance Nimic looks like a deliberate misspelling of mimic, yet a cursory look at Wiktionary tells me that it’s the Romanian word for both “nothing” and “anything”. This double meaning is a fitting descriptor of the film itself, which some will find laden with deeper themes and others will find rather empty. Perhaps I need to watch it again. And again. And again.
The film premiered as part of the Fuori concorso: Shorts programme in the Locarno Film Festival 2019, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Out on Mubi on Friday, November 27th (2020).
New York in the 1980s. Published biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is down on her luck as she can’t secure an advance from her agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin) for a proposed book on Fanny Brice. Lee likes her whisky and is generally rude and intolerant of other people, an attitude that has scarcely helped her career. She is struggling to pay the bills and when her beloved cat gets sick, the vet won’t give her credit. In financial desperation, she takes a stack of books to a local bookseller but he’ll only buy two – and those for a paltry sum.
At this point, she’s drinking in a bar when she’s spotted by Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) who hasn’t seen her since they were both “pleasantly pissed at some horrible book party” where, she seems to recall, something happened. He is just as self-centred and rude as she is, if somewhat more outrageous, and they hit it off.
Desperate for money, she sells a treasured personal letter from Katherine Hepburn to book dealer Anna (Dolly Wells) who is incidentally a fan of Lee’s own books. Lee realises there is money to be made and following the chance find of another celebrity letter in a public library, she starts first spicing up real letters via added postscripts then concocting entirely fake ones. Soon she’s using particular types of paper and specific typewriters to churn out fakes by the likes of “Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Judy Holliday, Louise Brooks, Marlene Dietrich and sincerely yours Noël Coward”.
Lee lets the unshockable Jack in on all this and, when her name is put on a list of sellers of fakes, enlists him to sell the home made documents on her behalf. The pair come up with a plan for her to steal documents from archives, replace them with fakes then sell the real letters. They fall out though after he housesits for her, brings a man back to the flat and generally trashes her apartment in her absence. That’s not quite why they fall out, but to reveal the exact reason would be a spoiler so we won’t go there. Meanwhile, their schemes catch up with them in the form of two FBI agents…
Adapted from the late, real life Lee Israel’s biography covering her time as a literary forger, this boasts a winsome performance from Richard E.Grant as the and who “fucked his way through New York” before succumbing to the Aids virus in later years. Far more impressive, however, is McCarthy, previously the brash and irritating comedienne in the likes of Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) and Tammy (Ben Falcone, 2014) playing an introverted woman virtually incapable of relationships beyond caring for her cherished cat.
With a deftly observed, adapted screenplay by Nicole Holofcener (at one time slated to direct this) and Jeff Whitty, this is a reasonably compelling character study of a woman possessed with an extraordinary aptitude for literary forgery, seemingly unstoppable once she discovers it. McCarthy is a revelation, whether pounding different makes of typewriter, insulting her agent or simply fussing over the cat. This may have something to do with her prior experience playing comedy and her attendant skills in comic timing: actors coming from that background (think: Steve Carell or Bill Murray) often achieve the extraordinary when required to play straight roles.
When McCarthy and Grant share the screen, there’s a palpable chemistry between them. Several other memorable performances include various minor booksellers, among them the aforementioned Dolly Wells and McCarthy’s husband and sometime director Ben Falcone, plus an archive librarian and a vet’s receptionist. The film has its flaws, among them an annoying, very conventional jazz score and lighting which tries a little too hard to be relaxing and easy on the eye. These minor defects scarcely detract from McCarthy’s deeply heartfelt and strongly nuanced performance though. She is a totally unexpected asset here and the main reason to see this film.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is out in the UK on Friday, February 1st. Watch the film trailer below:
Here’s a Christmas movie with a difference. It’s December 1985 and young New York ad agency man Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) flies home to Texas to see his family for the first time in several years. Tensions are immediately apparent between go-getter son and his blue-collar worker father Dale (Michael Chiklis) from the moment the latter picks him up from the airport. Once Adrian gets to the house, his devoted mother Eileen (Virginia Madsen) can’t stop fussing over him while his younger brother Andrew (Aidan Langford), in his early teens, is distant having never forgiven Adrian for leaving.
Each of the family members presents Adrian with a different challenge. Dad is horrified at his Christmas present of an expensive leather jacket while Adrian is slightly shocked to receive a brand new Bible. Mom encourages him to call up Carly (Jamie Chung), a girl with whom Adrian grew up who also left Texas and is likewise home for the holidays and who he hasn’t seen for years. Andrew quit the school football team for its drama society, which is giving him issues with the father who understands contact sports but doesn’t really get the arts.
Underneath all of this is the presence of the local conservative Christian church, briefly heard as dad sits listening to sermons on a Christian radio station and seen as a worship service which the family attend in Sunday best where Adrian struggles to sing the words of hymns which make him uneasy. Elsewhere, Adrian has an embarrassing encounter with former high school jock turned supermarket manager Mark (Ryan Piers Williams) who has become a Christian and apologises for his past treatment of Adrian, although the two clearly have nothing in common.
Adrian learns from Andrew that his younger brother’s Madonna music cassettes and Bryan Adams poster have been taken off him because the local pastor deems them ungodly. When Andrew discovers that his brother saw Madonna on tour, he suddenly has a new-found respect for him. As a covert Christmas present, Adrian gives him a $100 voucher for the local Sound Warehouse to replenish his audio cassette collection, admonishing Andrew to keep his purchases hidden.
Contacting Carly, Adrian is invited to see her do an impressive improv stand-up gig where she expresses “all the shit you daredn’t say in real life”. Following some time at a dance club, they go back to hers which ends badly when she comes on strong to him but he isn’t really interested. As he tells her, “I’ve had a shitty year.”
Shot in aesthetically pleasing black and white by Ten’s cameraman and co-screenwriter Hutch, this boasts a strong script with deftly sketched characters and is beautifully cast and acted to boot. It completely understands its chosen time period of the mid-eighties, a time of LP records and portable music cassette players, before mobile phones and the internet existed. The film grasps very profound topics: the pain of the gay community being decimated by the AIDS virus in urban locations like New York and the deficiencies of Bible Belt Protestant fundamentalism in its inability to comfort those feeling that pain. And it grasps them without judgement of one side or another.
This is full of genuinely touching moments. Via an overheard conversation in another room, Adrian hears his mother tell his father he really ought to wear that leather jacket to work. Carly’s stand-up routine details her heartfelt experiences of racism as a Korean-American. And in a frank conversation with his mother, Adrian learns that she… well, you’ll have to see the film to find out.
Most people have experienced the joys and heartaches of spending time with their families at Christmas. While 1985 is set in the Christmas of that year, and some of its issues are specific to that date and time, there’s also much here that relates to wider human issues of family, how children deal with parents and siblings, how parents deal with children and how, sometimes, with the best intentions, that can all go horribly wrong. And can then sometimes, somehow, tentatively, in small steps, be at least partly put right.
A Christmas treat.
1985 is out in the UK on Thursday, December 20th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 24th. Watch the film trailer below:
Highly respected rabbi Rav Krushna (Anton Lesser) addresses his synagogue about the qualities that make mankind different from the animals and the angels. Man, he says, has free will. Alone in creation, he is able to disobey his creator. Then, as if struck down for preaching some treatise in defence of apostasy, he collapses.
Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) is a British portrait photographer working in New York. She is promiscuous, rootless and seems to be looking for something although she’s no idea what. One day she gets a phone call which makes her return to London and the Hendon orthodox Jewish community which she left years ago. She heads straight for the house of Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), at once her father’s favourite pupil (and likely successor as Rav) and an old childhood friend. She’s a little surprised to find he and her other great childhood friend Esti (Rachel McAdams) are now man and wife. The couple agree to put Ronit up during her stay.
Two things become clear as the narrative plays out. One, Dovid’s relationship with the Rav is the father/child relationship that Ronit never had with her father. Dovid spent hours discussing Jewish religious texts with him while Ronit wasn’t really interested. But now she’s back, she wants proof that her father really did love her. Scant evidence is forthcoming on that front. Two, Ronit and Esti were in love back in the day. Ronit chose freedom from the religious community and got out; Esti married a husband as the community expected and made herself fit in. However although Dovid is a good man who cares deeply for Esti, there’s a certain spark missing in the relationship. A spark which threatens to ignite when Ronit returns.
There is much to admire here – tortured performances which plumb the depths of the soul from its two female leads, a feeling that the Orthodox Jewish background has been researched and put on the screen at a very deep level, unresolved issues with a departed father. It’s a world unfamiliar to the movies and to most cinemagoers, but the film plunges you right in. Director Sebastián Lelio and cameraman Danny Cohen seem completely in sync in their dealings with the cast, ensuring that those amazing things that actors do end up on the screen without the mechanics of film making getting in the way.
The theological and human contradiction of the Rav’s opening and final address underpin everything that follows. What is obedience? What is transgression? What’s more important – the community or the individual? As the two women struggle with their feelings for each other and events take their predictable course, you can almost feel the boxes of a contemporary Western individualist view being ticked off. Almost. The piece seems to be at its strongest where its characters struggle with these tensions.
Weisz is one of the instigating producers behind the project and has chosen well both in source material and director. It’s a surprisingly effective and cinematic movie adapted from a novel, a process which all too often produces the exact opposite outcome. Leilo having proved himself highly adept at stories involving women’s issues such in Gloria/2013 and transgressive sexuality in A Fantastic Woman (2017) here delivers a compelling story in a completely convincing, parochial North London environment. The result could so easily have been a tedious plod, but somehow, it all comes together. An impressive achievement.
Disobedience is in cinemas from Friday, November 30th (2017). On BritBox on Wednesday, March 17th (2021). On Mubi on Sunday, June 5th.
On one level, Nathaniel Kahn’s latest is a filmmaker’s dream. Kahn, who made the compelling documentary My Architect (2003) about his father Louis Kahn, had an idea for something about art and money and persuaded his backers to let him just go out and start shooting. And he got some great material. The Price Of Everything is mostly vox pops, although that’s augmented with footage of the subjects doing what they do – artists working in their studios, dealers checking proofs of catalogues, buyers showing us artworks in their homes – and the odd bit of historical footage such as of 1973’s infamous Robert Scull sale.
New York taxi driver Scull was both a brilliant publicist of events and an avid collector of modern art by then unknown artists. His sale at New York’s Sotheby Parke-Bernet of some 50 of his paintings saw them sell for up to 50 times the price he’d originally paid. It established the idea that artworks could be traded for considerable profit, enraging the artists who made no money whatsoever from such sales. Although, as Scull points out in archive footage to painter Robert Rauschenberg, the new prices set the bar for future sales of such artists’ works which would benefit them too in the long run.
Celebrated artist Jeff Koons, whose ‘Rabbit’ casts an inflatable silver-coloured rabbit in solid steel, is here revealed as as much a player of the art market as a maker of art. Like a Renaissance artist employing a vast team of over 100 artisans, his studio produces a steady stream of work designed to sell to collectors at the highest prices. The contradiction doesn’t seem to worry him, but it leaves a nasty taste if you think art is something more than commercial product.
At the other end of the scale, abstract painter Larry Poons was praised in the late sixties for his widely collected Op Art dot paintings. But when he abandoned that painting style for something looser, his newer works failed to sell like his favoured ones. The market is shown to elevate its chosen art practitioners such as Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose 2012 painting Drown catapulted her into the ranks of top selling artists when it fetched around five times its estimate at auction in 2016.
Alongside the artists, the film parades a veritable circus of dealers, buyers and others. Sotheby’s Amy Cappellazzo protests that contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter (seen in the film, but not that much) is happy to take money from private buyers, but would rather his works went to galleries where the wider public can see them. This assumes neither collectors nor museums have hidden them away in storage.
Elsewhere, collector Stefan Edlis proudly shows off works in his collection as well as his battered, ‘J’-stamped passport that came with him when he escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager. He clearly believes art is meant to be seen and in 2015 rather than secreting them out of sight somewhere as their collection increased, he and co-collector wife Gael Neeson donated some 42 works to the Art Institute Of Chicago where the public could see and enjoy them.
This (and much more besides) may be fascinating stuff, but the problem is that Kahn doesn’t seem to know what to do with it once he’s shot it. The resultant mishmash of watchable character studies lacks any real central thesis to pull it together. If you can get past the obscene sums of money moving from collectors to dealers, some of the people pictured come across well and others less so.
I had the feeling that the prices paid for the art works had little to do with their intrinsic (non-monetary) value. Kahn seems to recognise that most artists do what they do out of compulsion, not to make money. However, the only contemporary artists seen here are those who have been rewarded handsomely in financial terms at one time or another. The Price Of Everything is ultimately about capitalism and trading much more than the artists, who mostly appear incidental to the selling process and all too often separated from their work once it’s sold.
The Price Of Everything is out in the UK on Friday, November 16th. Watch the film trailer below:
You could be forgiven for thinking this is just another music documentary. Blues devotee and English guitarist Eric Clapton rose to fame in the sixties as in such bands as The Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek And The Dominoes. Since the seventies, he’s had a successful solo career. While Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars covers all that material in detail, its main focus is upon how Clapton coped (or didn’t) with the various tragedies in his life, some circumstantial and some self-inflicted.
A happy childhood ended at age nine with Eric’s discovery that his mum and dad were in fact his grandmother and grandfather and that his sister who had long since emigrated to Canada was in fact his mother. Worse, when she visited the family in England, she disowned him. Eric’s faith in humanity disintegrated at the most basic level: trust became impossible. On the BBC’s Uncle Mac kids’ radio show he heard the occasional Muddy Waters record and without any understanding of the music’s roots in the black man’s experience of the racist US connected with an art form that seemed to speak to him in his very core. As a teenager, he bought every blues record he could get his hands on.
Perhaps the film’s most telling clip has Clapton talk about feeling anger and working it out through his guitar. He demonstrates to the TV interviewer by playing a series of clearly angry licks. Years later, he dismisses some of his sixties material precisely on account of its anger.
Eric’s obsession with his best friend George Harrison’s then wife Pattie Boyd in the late sixties gave rise to the Layla album with his band Derek And The Dominoes, a powerful collection of unrequited love songs. He played Pattie the newly recorded work in an attempt to win her but she went back to her husband anyway. Around this time Clapton got sucked in to heroin addition and became a recluse. A few years later he made a comeback with an album and a world tour, but in reality he switched from smack to alcohol and became a wildly unpredictable performer who on one occasion told audiences to go out and vote for (racist British politician) Enoch Powell. As a man who loved the Blues and admired many black musicians, Clapton was deeply ashamed of this particular incident afterwards. He barely remembers the string of albums he made as an alcoholic. To illustrate the point, most of the record covers from the period whizz by in a matter of seconds on the screen.
He seemed to finally get his life on track when he discovered the joys of fatherhood in the late eighties only for his young son Conor to tragically fall out of a skyscraper window in New York a few years later. Determined to live life from then on in a manner that would honour his late son, Clapton wrote the song Tears In Heaven as part of his process of dealing with this tragedy. In recent years he appears to have found genuine happiness as a married family man with three daughters.
His route to his current contentment has been a harrowing one. By documenting Eric’s various personal struggles, his friend and the film’s director Lili Fini Zanuck has crafted a striking portrait which, far from merely showcasing a celebrated guitarist (which task it fulfils more than adequately in passing) tells how, via his impassioned music, this extraordinary individual has worked through the terrible situations in which he’s either placed or found himself.
Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars is out in the UK on Friday, January 12th. Watch the film trailer below:
This a a golden opportunity to deep dive into the heart of the highly secretive and insular Hasidic Jewish community of Brooklyn, in New York City. Menashe (Menashe Lustig) is a kind and yet clumsy and socially inept grocery store clerk. His wife has now passed away and he wants to keep custody of his only child Rieven (Ruben Niborski), but he faces an uphill struggle from his very own ultra-conservative group, which does not approve of a single man raising a boy.
The topic of the young and blundering widower rediscovering life and in some ways behaving like a bachelor, unable to keep his house clean and cook for himself, is quite universal. At moments, I could almost picture a Hollywood comedy such as Mrs Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993). There is an enormous pressure for Menashe to remarry, and his attempts at finding a last-minute wife are funny and awkward. All decisions are ultimately made by the Ruv (a senior master), so Menashe has to come across as a presentable and viable father and citizen to everyone he comes across, lest they rat on him.
Ultimately, this is not a film about the religion, and the issues are relatable for people of most creeds and in mostcorners of the world. But the script isn’t entirely riveting. It lacks subplots, and the consistent focus of Menashe’s plight just isn’t effective enough from both a cinematic and a dramatic perspective The stoical attitude of the community sometimes borders the monotonous. Despite the universality of the topic, the movie often banal. It’s more interesting to watch as a peek into a hermetically closed society than a compelling drama.
Menashe is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, November 3rd. The film has previously toured the US and Europe, and showed at various film festivals. Out on all major VoD platforms in April.
A deceptively short film (it runs a mere 80 minutes), Most Beautiful Island is an increasingly unnerving trip to an unexpected destination. New York footage follows different women, one per shot, navigating serial crowded spaces. Eventually a shot frames Luciana (Spanish writer-director Asensio, from Madrid). Titles. Then she’s speaking Spanish on the phone to her mother who wants her to come back. She won’t because of of her past (which is never explained).
She visits Dr. Horovitz (David Little), attempting to scam a consultation off him without paying. (This is the US, remember, where medical treatment isn’t free at the point of need to all as in the UK, but available for a $75 fee for those lacking a social security number. A chilling glimpse of the system after which the UK’s current neoliberal government might want to model the NHS.) She takes a bath, peeling tape off the wall to admit a cluster of cockroaches which she watches swim for their own survival as she relaxes.
Work. She and her friend Olga (Natasha Romanova) wearing vests, hot pants and beaked masks regale passers by with the slogan: “the best chicken in the Big Apple”. Luciana is sick of poorly paying gigs like this. As they chat in a cafe after, Olga gets a text for a gig tonight which she can’t do because she’s double-booked. So she offers it to Luciana. $2 000 for attending a party and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want. You need to wear high heels and a black dress. So Luciana has to buy a black dress. She finds a way despite lack of funds. There are other obstacles to negotiate – a missed text telling her she’s babysitting now and has to pick up the children (she’s late), hiding her backpack and possessions in a bin outside the building as she’s not allowed to take it to the party.
And the party itself. Watched over by a menacing doorman (producer Larry Fessenden) and told what to do by self-assured hostess Vanessa (Caprice Benedetti), Luciana and five other women stand in their designated, numbered chalk circles. They are inspected by wealthy guests, mostly males in suits, who will bet on the girls behind closed doors. Luciana was supposed to replace Olga, but Olga is not only present but also appears to have recruited several other girls. No-one will tell Luciana what the game involves. Eventually, she and Olga are chosen…
The first half hour lifts the lid on the immigrant experience in New York. Women like Luciana and Olga have their reasons for leaving their home countries and can’t go back, but now find themselves in precarious situations. They’re the global underclass and the game which they’re paid handsomely to attend is a divertissement for rich and powerful guests. The script is loosely based on an unpleasant if bizarre personal experience of Asensio’s and what subsequently transpires is horrifyingly believable. Alienating Big Apple imagery anchors the piece: shared apartments, busy streets, cab interiors. A pavement trap door leads down to a literal underworld of claustrophobic lift and (in US vernacular) ‘bathroom’ interiors, impersonal corridors and and brutal cement basements. In this cold environment the party game will play out.
Yet even as Luciana scams her way towards the mystery beyond the door in the hope of financial salvation, in passing there are hints of something better. The world isn’t just kids threatening that their mother will replace their babysitter because she’s late again: it’s also a place where a shopkeeper, seeing someone in trouble, will not only allow her a few days’ credit to get her out of a tight spot but also slip her a free sweet to help get her through the bad times.
Made quickly on a meagre budget, Most Beautiful Island is a more powerful film than numerous more polished, bigger budgeted films out there. We aren’t going to reveal its game except to say it’s most definitely one you want to experience. It is out in the UK on Friday, December 1st, and it’s available on BFI Player just after Christmas.
I arrived in New York a week ago in order to attend the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival. Oddly most of the screenings I wanted to go were not in Tribeca neighbourhood, but in Chelsea instead. I soon remembered the Chelsea Hotel and all the legendary people who once lived there and I started wondering to myself where the building might be.
So I asked the Festival staff where iconic hotel is. “It’s just outside to your right”. “What do you mean? On the same block?” “Yes.” So I went outside and I was petrified by what I saw. I had literally passed through a passage on the sidewalk that was covering the entrance of the hotel and I didn’t realise it was Chelsea Hotel. The sign was not lit. Dozens of workers were getting in and out carrying paint and wires. Was this the same place where Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odissey? It couldn’t be true.
I tried to get in and take photos inside but there was a sign in the lobby: “No pictures”. I asked the porter if I could take a picture of the sign that says “No pictures” and that wasn’t possible, either. Oh, well, then Chelsea Hotel, which originally opened in 1885, is just an abandoned museum locked away from trespassers, I thought.
So I went away and did some research, and I found out that the hotel has been undergoing major restoration for more than five years. Two companies had abandoned the works due to all sorts of challenges, from legal to structural. The tenants sued the hotel developer Joe Chetrit in 2011, because he shut down water and electricity. Now BD Hotels Group bought the hotel and it’s being converted into luxury accommodation. They were knocking down walls, this is a major and complete revamp.
The Chelsea Hotel doesn’t look particularly iconic and glamorous right now.
One hotel, many films
I thought of all the artists – filmmakers, musicians, etc, that had created some of their finest pieces at the Chelsea Hotel. I thought particularly of the films that we’ve written about on DMovies in the past 15 months. First I thought of Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (Fenton Bailey/Randy Barbato): this is where the late photographer lived with Patti Smith. They didn’t have any money to pay the rent, but Smith convinced the owner Stanley that it would be a temporary stay. They paid only $55 a week for the rent In 1969. Mapplethorpe took his first photographs in their flat. – here for our review of the movie.
I remembered Shirley Clarke collaborating with Sam Shepard, who has recently worked in Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols, 2016). Clarke lived in the penthouse. She filmed junkies waiting for their drug dealer The Connection (1961) and she shot the very controversial doc about Jason Holliday, called Portrait of Jason in 1967. The documentary Jason and Shirley (Stephen Winter, 2016) reveals how Shirley manipulated Jason in order to create a grotesque circus of homophobia and racism around him – click here for our review of Winter’s outstanding doc.
I wanted to know what happened to the room in which Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen lived their last days – click here for our review of the biopicSad Vacation: The Last Days of Sid and Nancy (Danny Garcia, 2016). The Chelsea Hotel porter told me the room in the first floor was shut forever (I soon found out that this wasn’t true; but just hang on for now). The stairs that led to the first floor were blocked for many years because people used to come around and leave flowers at the front door (now this is very true).
There is no plaque marking the room where Sid and Nancy spent their last days, and it was thanks to a serendipitous resident that Maysa snapped this.
A pooch’s poo opens doors
The following day I came back to pay homage to the Chelsea Hotel from outside. I had almost given up taking pictures and writing about the hotel, when suddenly a nice young lady came out of the building with her pooch. The creature stopped just beside me and emptied its bowels.
Maybe Biggie, the dog, thought I was Divine in John Waters’ 1972 classic Pink Flamingos. It’s true that earlier in the same day a man believed I was a drag queen (I’m the one pictured at the top of the article, so you can decide that yourself). But eating dog shit is a no-go for me. Instead I started talking to the lady, whose name is Man-Laï. She invited me to her flat, room 111, which is on the same floor as Sid Vicious’s room. And being in the company of a resident, I was finally allowed to take pictures. She pointed the famous room to me and I quickly snapped the picture above. She told me that an architect now lives there. Some time ago, a classic piano player used to wake her up playing Debussy. That’s very different from a punk riff.
Maysa photographs Man-Laï in the comfort of her own flat, while she shares film anecdotes of the past.
Mingling with the resident
Man-Laï has been living in the Chelsea Hotel for many years. She raised her twin daughters as a single mom there. Her first room was where Jim Morrison lived. She doesn’t think that the Chelsea Hotel is a weird place. “It is home!”
She shows me the balcony and shares some precious information. “You know, I could see the shooting of House of D. (David Duchovny, 2004) with Robin Williams from my balcony. And last year, Olivia Wilde was here.” She played the role of Devon Finestra in the TV series Vinyl for HBO.
It seems even during the restoration, theChelsea Hotel continues to inspire filmmakers. Man-Laï also remembers how crowded the lobby was when Natalie Portman played a 12-year-old New York girl in Leon: The Professional (Luc Besson, 1994). The shooting lasted two weeks.
She shows me all books about the Chelsea Hotel she keeps as close as a Bible to a Christian. Chelsea Hotel is her home, even though right now it is a old building full of cracks. “I saw a dead body once here. The men fell from the tenth floor. They wouldn’t allow me to get into my flat. The elevator was blocked, but I said it was my home. I had to jump over the dead body.”
