High Art

Few films have captured the uneasy transaction between artistic integrity, professional ambition and intimate desire as precisely as High Art. Released in 1998, the first feature written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko initially appears to be a modest New York drama, yet its emotional architecture is remarkably intricate. Syd, played with controlled impatience by Radha Mitchell, has recently moved from intern to assistant editor at the prestigious photography magazine Frame. The promotion sounds impressive, but the reality is less flattering: she remains the person asked to fetch coffee while her supposedly more experienced colleagues appropriate the authority she is struggling to earn. Her life changes because of something almost comically mundane—a leak dripping through her bathroom ceiling. Following the water upstairs, she enters the apartment of Lucy Berliner, a celebrated photographer who abandoned the art world ten years earlier. What begins as a plumbing problem becomes a passage between two universes: downstairs, Syd’s ordered but suffocating existence; upstairs, a dimly lit territory of photographs, cigarettes, bodies and narcotic sleep.

Played by Ally Sheedy in the performance that definitively shattered the image attached to her Brat Pack years, Lucy Berliner is both magnetic and visibly eroded. She lives with Greta, a former German actress portrayed by Patricia Clarkson, whose languid accent and bruised glamour suggest someone who has turned decadence into a survival ritual. Greta speaks nostalgically about having worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as though proximity to a dead genius might still provide her with an identity. Around the couple drifts a small court of friends and addicts, reclining across the furniture, playing Scrabble after taking heroin and allowing entire days to dissolve without purpose. The apartment does not resemble a decorative movie version of bohemian life; it feels occupied, stale and burdened by years of repetition. This is one of the film’s great achievements. Lisa Cholodenko never reduces these people to fashionable outsiders or moral examples. Their existence can seem seductive from Syd’s doorway, but the longer she remains inside, the more clearly we understand that this supposed freedom has become another kind of confinement.

Syd’s discovery that Lucy Berliner took the photographs hanging on the walls immediately changes the balance between them. Attraction, admiration and opportunity become impossible to separate. Syd sees a neglected artist, but she also sees the project that could establish her career. Lucy, meanwhile, recognizes in Syd the hunger and momentum she has lost. Their relationship is therefore never a simple opposition between an innocent young woman and a destructive older seductress. Each offers the other something urgently desired: Syd gives Lucy a reason to work again, while Lucy grants Syd professional legitimacy and entry into a queer world that seems more vivid than anything available in her downstairs life. Radha Mitchell is particularly convincing when Syd attempts to disguise uncertainty with the vocabulary of critical theory, looking and sounding like someone who believes adulthood can be achieved through sheer determination. Ally Sheedy, by contrast, makes stillness eloquent. A faint smile, a prolonged glance or a moment of withdrawal reveals how carefully Lucy protects the vulnerability beneath her authority.

The photography itself deepens this ambiguity. Although the character evokes artists such as Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus, the images attributed to Lucy were principally created for the film by JoJo Whilden, with contributions from a larger group of photographers. They possess the necessary intimacy: lovers and friends appear caught between performance and exposure, seemingly unaware of the border separating private life from art. This becomes the film’s central question. Does the camera preserve a moment, exploit it, or do both simultaneously? The same uncertainty surrounds Syd, who may genuinely love Lucy while also transforming her into a marketable comeback story. Frame is interested not merely in new photographs but in the publicity value of resurrecting a vanished talent. Once Lucy agrees to produce a cover feature on the condition that Syd serve as her editor, affection becomes entangled with a commercial contract. The magazine congratulates itself for rediscovering an artist it did nothing to sustain, while Syd’s advancement depends upon delivering both Lucy’s work and the mythology surrounding her.

Visually, High Art maintains a striking tension between faded warmth and institutional coldness. The cinematography of Tami Reiker gives Lucy’s apartment a hazy, tactile quality, while the magazine offices appear sterile and governed by unspoken hierarchies. The muted score by Shudder to Think never dictates an emotion; it hangs over the images like smoke, enhancing the sensation that something dangerous is unfolding almost too slowly to notice. Lisa Cholodenko also resists turning the film into a conventional addiction melodrama. Heroin is not introduced with sensational montages or explanatory speeches. It is simply present—passed around, inhaled, injected and incorporated into everyday routines. Even the film’s title carries a bitter double meaning, connecting the cultural prestige of “high art” with the chemically induced suspension in which Lucy, Greta and their circle exist. The joke is obvious, but the film’s treatment of it is not. Artistic romanticism and self-destruction are shown sharing the same room without ever becoming synonymous.

The most moving scenes are often those in which characters fail to provide what another person needs. Lucy attempts to confess her confusion to her mother, played with formidable emotional distance by Tammy Grimes, only to discover that money and family loyalty cannot substitute for genuine assistance. Greta understands that Syd threatens her relationship, yet heroin remains the strongest argument she can make for Lucy to stay. Syd’s boyfriend James, played by Gabriel Mann, recognizes her ambition but responds with resentment rather than concern. None of these people is entirely wrong, and none is capable of interrupting the approaching disaster. Even the love scene between Syd and Lucy avoids fantasy: it is tentative, verbal and filled with awkward requests for reassurance. The moment matters because Syd is not simply discovering another woman’s body; she is discovering how intoxicating it can be to feel seen by someone whose gaze has already been validated as art. When Lucy eventually photographs her, intimacy becomes an image, and the image becomes a product. That quiet transformation is more unsettling than any explicit betrayal.

Nearly three decades later, the film’s queer representation remains notable precisely because queerness is never treated as the cause of the tragedy. Syd and Lucy are not punished for loving women; they are damaged by addiction, unequal power, emotional dependency and a professional culture eager to turn private experience into valuable content. The final movement may appear more overtly tragic than the film’s otherwise restrained construction, but its severity is earned by the moral contradiction at its heart: Syd obtains the recognition she wanted at the exact moment it becomes impossible to enjoy. Her success is real, her grief is real, and the magazine can package both inside the same beautiful cover. High Art is consequently much more than a period portrait of 1990s downtown New York or an account of forbidden attraction. It is an incisive examination of what happens when love, art and ambition begin borrowing one another’s language, until nobody can tell where desire ends and exploitation begins. Anchored by the extraordinary work of Ally Sheedy, the layered vulnerability of Radha Mitchell and the mordant despair of Patricia Clarkson, Lisa Cholodenko’s debut remains sensual, intelligent and painfully contemporary.

High Art
Written and Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Produced by Dolly Hall, Susan A. Stover, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
Starring Ally Sheedy, Radha Mitchell, Patricia Clarkson, Gabriel Mann, Bill Sage
Cinematography: Tami Reiker
Edited by Amy E. Duddleston
Music by Shudder to Think
Production companies: Antidote Films
Distributed by October Films (United States), MK2 Distribution (France)
Release dates: June 12, 1998 (United States), January 6, 1999 (France)
Running time: 102 minutes

Seen on 5 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre