“On the Other Side of No Tomorrow:” High Art and the Art of Seduction

A love triangle involving hard drugs could be a Steely Dan song; in the mid 1970s they wrote about the grim reality of the junkie life: “I was halfway crucified / I was on the other side / Of no tomorrow.” By the late 1990s, heroin was back in fashion after a 1980s fascination with cocaine. As these things go, the higher the risk, the greater the thrill becomes in taking a trip to that other side.

Of course, some never return.  But it sure can look cool, and these conflicting desires get worked through in High Art, a film about the “heroin chic” lesbian scene in the East Village of NYC in 1998. The porousness of the social demarcations of this scene is symbolized through a leaky ceiling in the loft apartment of Syd (Radha Mitchell), a young assistant editor at an art-photography magazine, Frame (a fictional composite of Interview, Aperture, Paper, etc.).

The other two sides of a love triangle are in the loft above: Lucy (Ally Sheedy), a once-famous photographer, and Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a German actor who gained some notoriety by working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the legendary, bad-boy filmmaker. At the margins of the trendy art world that Frame documents, Lucy and Greta are a languid couple, their lives together mediated by/medicated with heroin, the center of a microcosmos of transactional relationships, all based on scoring/using.

Once Syd stumbles onto Lucy’s darkroom while repairing the leak upstairs (pointing to her initiative), she views Lucy as a reclamation project, having found out from her uber-abusive bosses at Frame that Lucy torched her career by running off, with Greta, to Germany. The reason for Lucy and Greta’s resurfacing in NYC is a detail that the film’s writer/director Lisa Cholodenko smartly glosses over, focusing on the more predictable story of Syd’s falling in love with Lucy.

This relationship consequently, enrages Greta, who wages a cold war (that at times heats up) to get Lucy back. Hiding a steely resolve behind an attitude of seeming to not give a shit, Greta pits her experience (especially the tricks she presumably learned when working with Fassbinder) against Syd’s relative innocence. Cholodenko makes sure that we don’t miss the bleak comedy of these scenes: such as Syd’s when-in-Rome act of taking a polite sniff of heroin juxtaposed with Greta’s junkie luck of being discovered, mid-OD, in the nick of time, thus saved from permanent residency on the other side.

Although High Art is Cholodenko’s remarkable filmmaking debut, many of the scenes can feel like hanging out at an endless drug party. Sure, you can cop a moralistic attitude (users are losers, dude) and/or thumb through the lengthy list of artworks about sex/drugs/seduction that the film may recall. Yet there’s something—really, more than just one thing—that keeps High Art moving.

In another smart decision by Cholodenko, we don’t find out an important detail about Lucy until we have had time to have formed an opinion about her. That is, it’s easy to see Lucy as an insular, defiant, self-destructive artist. But it’s later revealed that Lucy has FU money, courtesy of her family, that underwrites her life choices. Regardless of the questions now raised, such as how much Lucy’s embrace of artful decadence is just a pose, there’s a discernible logic behind Lucy’s move away from an older woman whose opioid habit is severe enough that she nods off in restaurants, and towards a younger one who can restart her career.

Ramping up the intensity is how the actors play off of one another. Mitchell’s tired eyes, reflective of Syd’s high-stress job, brighten when she starts to realize that she can both advance her career, and have a passionate, sexy lover. Sheedy shows us how Lucy’s outlaw allure emanates from her being an artist, which she shores up by trying harder to stay clean. Clarkson, in character as a washed-up actor, chews the scenery in the role of an aging vamp/ire.

Syd and Lucy’s coming together brings another relationship, art/commerce, into the foreground. Then Sheedy makes good on her starring role as Lucy, finding the powerful throughline in her character’s decisiveness, once chances have been taken. At the last minute, Lucy makes up her mind about how she will shoot the cover of the next issue of Frame, which Syd’s bosses have given her: she will photograph Syd.

You can surmise that Lucy has longed to mess with the pretentious gatekeepers of the art world, for she finds the desperate attempts by Syd’s bosses to stay chill laughable (and we do too), and you wouldn’t be wrong. You can also argue the ethics here, but the resulting photos look stunning. At the same time, these photos capture Syd at her most vulnerable. She may be able to dabble in heroin; love has taken her all the way.

While a Hollywood happy ending seems possible, any proper resolution requires a farewell scene between Lucy and Greta, This scene, however, turns into a rather more realistic outcome. Lucy arrives, just out of rehab. Greta, giving the performance of a lifetime, makes her the “let’s do it one more time together” offer. Lucy accepts, resulting in her fatal OD.

After Syd gets the news that Lucy’s gone, she goes to the office, with a look of getting the hell out of there. The new issue of Frame features one of Lucy’s photos of Syd on the cover. A reminder that, of course, some never return.