‘High Art’: the LGBTQ+ romance Roger Ebert called “masterful”
Representation for the LGBTQ+ community was hardly prevalent in American cinema in the 1990s, but there was nonetheless a significant uptick in the independent scene throughout the decade, with scholar and academic B. Ruby Rich noticing such a rise in stories being told that she coined the term ‘new queer cinema’ to describe the burgeoning movement.
One of its leading lights would prove to be writer and director Lisa Chodolenko, who would go on to script and helm Laurel Canyon, Cavedweller, and The Kids Are All Right, the latter of which would gain further recognition as one of the first major mainstream films to focus on a same-sex couple raising teenage children, win a Golden Globe for ‘Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy’, and earn Chodolenko an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
However, it was her first feature that earned high praise from Roger Ebert after he called her 1998 debut High Art “masterful”. Receiving a rapturous reception following its premiere at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, the complex romantic drama boasts hugely accomplished performances from Radha Mitchell, Ally Sheedy, and Patricia Clarkson as they skirt around the edges of a love triangle.
Mitchell’s Syd is an ambitious editor at a photography magazine living with her boyfriend, who stumbles upon the revelations one floor up. Sheedy’s upstairs neighbour Lucy is a renowned photographer who left her profession behind under unexplained circumstances, and the reasons soon become apparent when Clarkson’s heroin-addicted live-in girlfriend and German actress Greta enters the picture.
After being tempted to end her self-imposed exile at Syd’s magazine as long as she’s her assigned editor, Lucy and the younger woman are drawn so close that their professional relationship soon becomes a personal one, all while the layers are stripped back on Lucy’s interior life at the same time Syd rises up the ranks of the unforgiving art scene.
Suitably won over by High Art, Ebert described it as being “masterful in the little details”. Chodolenko’s film “knows how career ambition and office politics can work together” to motivate Syd on her journey, with the legendary critic saluting the aching realism, naturalistic performances, and refusal to shy away from the harsh realities of drug addiction that defines the movie.
Todd Haynes’ Poison, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, Gregg Araki’s The Living End, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, and Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together are regularly cited as among the most important and influential titles of the ‘new queer cinema’ years, but Chodolenko’s maiden foray behind the camera is more than worthy of inclusion, too.
Ebert definitely believed it to be worthy of a glowing appraisal, and it immediately marked the filmmaker out as a talent with a bright future of telling their own stories.
