Homeless and drifting from one person’s sofa to another, Wren (Susan Berman) is obsessed with “fame for fame’s sake”, even though the young woman possesses no particular talents. Her day job at a copy shop allows her to print mysterious flyers featuring her own face and scatter them around the outskirts of New York, while her nights are spent in the grimy clubs of a city living its post-punk phase. Alongside a string of half-hearted relationships with men, Wren finances her opportunistic groupie existence by mugging subway passengers. Nor is Berman’s brilliantly drawn character hardly a masterful heroine but rather a deeply questionable human being, inspired by the dogged perseverance of Giulietta Masina in Le Notti di Cabiria, the almost delusional single-mindedness of Holly Golightly, and the self-destructive sparkling of Nancy Spungen.
In keeping with its original title, Susan Seidelman’s fragmented feature debut was shot guerrilla-style on location on 16 mm film with a budget of around $ 40,000. The seedy, vanishing landscapes of East Village are preserved in a unique time capsule, much like the singular generational experience of a subculture itself, while the rough-edged debut drew attention as far away as Europe when it became the first American independent film ever selected for the main competition at Cannes Film Festival.
Lauri Timonen