Chelsea Girls

Saw Chelsea Girls, a boring yet enigmatic film directed by Andy Warhol (but really by Paul Morrissey.)  It was originally 6 hours long, however they mercifully cut it down to only 3 hours by cutting the screen in half and playing two films next to each other.  The projectionist was free to switch the audio channel however they wanted.  The version I saw is free on YouTube, so that may be the official sound selection for all I know.  It's a series of about a dozen short films (30 minute or so) starring Andy's drugged-up, indolent friends.

Here's the movie in microcosm: two guys are laying in bed.  One is fairly attractive and wearing only underwear.  They talk for a while and then a woman gets on the bed and straps the attractive guy's wrists together with her belt and winds a scarf around his neck.  He sort of writhes about for a while and it's not clear if he's being strangled or is on drugs or is just bored and playing around or doesn't even want to be there.  This goes on for another 15 minutes.

I can enjoy some delicious ambiguity and I like an attractive guy, but to be left stranded with nothing to entertain me for so long is either malicious or incompetent and I think most likely the latter.  The entire 3 hours is like this.  We see attractive people from the 60s being bored out of their minds and vaguely improvising for the camera.  It's interesting as a sort of time capsule of how theater-types behave when they are as bored as we the audience have become.

There is one moment though, that I was able to latch on to: this guy who is tripping on something strips while telling us very personal details about his relationships.  It's not salacious (the personal details) but more like a therapy session.  He talks about how he loses himself in other people, how he becomes what they want "and then I-" he says as the film cuts him off.  That's a nice bit.  In addition to the emotional baring being mirrored by the flesh baring, he has indeed become what I wanted from the film: something personal and interesting to think about and relate to.  And then, just as with his relationships - he's gone!  Lovely.

It makes me wonder if there's something I missed in the other sequences.  But then it's followed by some dude shooting up heroin and proclaiming himself to be the pope in a braying voice and carrying on with not-very-amusing banter.  This tedium drags on for another half hour before the whole film finally finishes as every other scene did: for no apparent reason.

So, rare glimmers of something interesting all but lost in an arid, self-indulgent wasteland of a movie.