☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Smithereens
(1982) – S. Seidelman
NYC looks like shit in Susan Seidelman’s
1982 punk debut but it is the perfect milieu for the youth at loose ends that
populate her story. Most of them seem to
have fled to the city to escape their home lives and to join like-minded others
slumming it in the scene. Wren wants
badly to be cool and she manipulates and uses others to try to reach this goal
and it doesn’t work well for her. The
film is her character study. She falls
in with nice guy Paul from Montana, who lives out of his van but she doesn’t
treat him right, instead trying to curry the favour of punk rocker Eric
(Richard Hell) who wants to hit the road to L.A. The soundtrack by The Feelies (songs from
Crazy Rhythms) is the perfect accompaniment to Wren’s travails and adds mood
and depth in the ellipses between scenes.
The dialogue, though clearly scripted, takes on a naturalistic, almost
Morrissey-Warhol sort of feel. You feel
you are there. But where? In a world
that no longer exists, dated, scrubbed clean, erased. Nice to see this on the big screen at the
Melbourne International Film Festival.
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