High Art 1998 Movie Review

『Art and Desire, Addiction and Wounds: The Complex Relationships and Longings Between Women』

🎥 Movie Overview

🎬 Title: High Art (1998)
🌍 Country: 🇺🇸 USA
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Romance / Indie
🗓️ Production & Release: Miramax Films
⏳ Runtime: 96 minutes
📢 Director: Lisa Cholodenko
🖋️ Screenplay: Lisa Cholodenko

👩‍💼 Cast: Ally Sheedy – Lucy
Radha Mitchell – Syd
Patricia Clarkson – Greta

🧩 Story Deep Dive (Spoilers)

🎨 The Subtle Intersection of Art and Desire

High Art is set against the cynical and dark allure of New York’s 1990s art scene, delicately portraying ambition, artistic solitude, and the intense pull of same-sex attraction. It remains a significant milestone in queer cinema.

🖼 Addiction, Love, and the Dilemma of Choice

The film focuses on the starkly contrasting lives of two women and their destructive yet passionate relationship.

• Syd: An ambitious woman in her early twenties. She works as an assistant editor at the high-end photography magazine Frame, diligently building her career. Living with her boyfriend, her orderly life represents the world of “low art”—the banalities of reality.

• Lucy: A legendary photographer in her forties who once caused a sensation but suddenly retired. Living upstairs with her heroin-addicted partner Greta, Lucy embodies the isolation and self-destruction of “high art”.

A trivial incident—water leaking from the ceiling—leads Syd to Lucy’s apartment upstairs, pulling her controlled world into Lucy’s unpredictable and dangerous one.

🍂 The Triangle of Ambition, Art, and Addiction

✒️ The Boundary Between Ambition and Morality (Syd)

Syd’s character embodies the theme of ambition for success. Discovering Lucy’s photographs, she realizes that featuring Lucy on the magazine cover could be a decisive breakthrough for her career.

• Double Fascination: Syd simultaneously harbors a pure admiration for Lucy’s art and a professional ambition to use Lucy as a means to climb higher.

• Sexual Awakening: As her relationship with Lucy evolves from professional collaboration to a passionate sexual relationship, Syd begins to break away from the heterosexual life she thought defined her. Yet her attraction intertwines with a longing for the forbidden, elite world that Lucy represents.

💦 The Loneliness and Self-Destruction of an Artist (Lucy)

Lucy symbolizes the isolation and pressures of artistic genius. Her sudden retirement and descent into addiction stem from the alienation and burnout she felt between commercial success and “true high art.”

• Drug Addiction: For Lucy, heroin is the only escape from the pressures of reality and the art world. Her addiction is tightly intertwined with Greta’s presence, with Greta portrayed as a personification of Lucy’s longstanding pain and destructive cycles.

• The Meaning of Photography: Lucy’s photographs are often dark, intimate, and voyeuristic, reflecting how she captures the lives of others while remaining trapped in her own solitude.

🌓 The 1990s New York Art Scene and “Heroin Chic”

The film embodies the unique aesthetics of 1990s indie cinema, sharply capturing the “heroin chic” culture prevalent in the art world at the time. Its muted colors, dim lighting, and worn-down apartment setting illustrate the decadent yet romanticized world Lucy and Greta inhabit. Director Lisa Cholodenko uses this environment not merely as a “cool” backdrop but as a lens to dissect the pain of addiction and human vulnerability.

💬 Interpretation of the Ending and Its Tragedy

When Lucy leaves for Syd’s magazine shoot and their relationship reaches its peak, Syd decides to abandon everything—her boyfriend, her job—to devote herself fully to Lucy. But upon her return, she finds Lucy has already died of a heroin overdose.

This tragic ending can be interpreted in several ways:

• The Tragedy of Art vs. Life: Through her relationship with ambitious Syd, Lucy briefly shows a will to live again. Yet, unable to break from her destructive cycle (Greta/addiction), her death symbolizes the artist consumed by the pursuit of “high art.”

• The Failure of Salvation: Syd sought to save Lucy while also saving her own career through her. Lucy’s death underscores the harsh reality that no external love or ambition can rescue someone from deep inner pain and addiction.

• The Cost of Growth: For Syd, the experience exposes the darkness hidden beneath the sweetness of professional success. This tragedy leaves open the possibility of her transformation—not just as a careerist but as a mature artistic mediator who understands deep human emotions.

🎥 Lisa Cholodenko’s Sensual Direction

High Art stands out as a queer romance film that portrays same-sex relationships not simply through the lens of “coming out” or social struggle, but by realistically depicting complex and fluid desires, power dynamics, and identity confusion within human connections.

Ally Sheedy’s restrained yet powerful performance as Lucy Berliner, alongside Patricia Clarkson’s chilling portrayal of Greta, earned critical acclaim. This debut film established Cholodenko’s reputation, later reinforced in The Kids Are All Right, for her ability to deeply explore the psychology of complex and ambiguous female characters.

🎯 Personal Rating (Preference)

💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★★★