Dir. Abel Ferrara. US. 2008. 88mins
The Chelsea hotel in New York has a global reputation as the place where artists go to enhance their notoriety. Dylan Thomas slid into alcoholic oblivion from a room at the Chelsea. Sid Vicious’s girlfriend Nany Spungen died there and its portals have welcomed everyone from Arthur Miller to Andy Warhol, Charles Bukowski and Vladimir Nabokov. Director Abel Ferrara has also been a resident at the Chelsea and his modest, loosely-assembled documentary on its heyday as a bohemian refuge is more effective in its conventional talking heads material than some ill-advised dramatic recreations of key events in the establishment’s illustrious past.
The film’s uneven, rambling nature would seem to herald few theatrical reservations for Chelsea On The Rocks but there is a much stronger likelihood of buoyant television sales and interest from documentary festivals.
Ferrara’s attempt to capture the essence of the Chelsea has been prompted by the sale of the hotel to a company more interested in its commercial future than its gaudy past. Manager Stanley Bard, who took over the running of the hotel from his father in 1955, has been squeezed out of the picture for reasons that remain something of a mystery. The days when individuals could take up permanent residency and not worry about the rent are clearly numbered. An end-of-an-era nostalgia hangs over the film as we meet some of the current residents who recall the wild days and drug-fuelled excesses of the Chelsea’s finest hours.
But the film is infuriating in its refusal to identify any of the individuals being interviewed. We have no idea who these people are or what weight they carry in the bigger picture of the hotel’s hundred year history which is never explained or sketched out. Why the hotel become a magnet for the great and good of 20th century American artistic life is one of the questions the film never addresses.
The question of identification is not a problem in the case of an Ethan Hawke, who stayed at the Chelsea after the collapse of his marriage to Uma Thurman, or Milos Forman, who lived there in the early 1970s. Forman provides some memorable anecdotes including the time an old woman appeared to have set her room on fire and the fire department drowned her in their attempts to save her, or so he claims.
This all seems remarkably conventional for an Abel Ferrara film but the director can’t help but add his own special touches to the project in dramatised scenes of the last hours of Sid Vicious (Jamie Burke) and Nancy Spungen (Bijou Phillips) that are badly written and performed with such an awkward, amateur air that they are embarrassing. The same could be said of scenes apparently depicting Janis Joplin (Shanyn Leigh) which also feature Grace Jones.
The film would lose nothing if the dramatic re-enactments were cut and it would still retain the Ferrara signature in its rather shambling manner and the way the director imposes himself on the narrative by his appearances on camera and casual interviewing technique. The fact that Chelsea On The Rocks isn’t a straightforward historical portrait of the hotel is part of its charm but also something of a drawback to its general accessibility.
Production Company
Deer Jen
International Sales
Wild Bunch
+ 33 (0) 1 53 01 50 30
Producers
Jen Gatien
David D. Wasserman
Screenplay
Christ Zois
David Linter
Abel Ferrara
Cinematography
Ken Kelsch
Editor
Langdon Page
Music
G.E. Smith
Tony Garnier
Main cast
Ethan Hawke
Milos Forman
Adam Goldberg
Dennis Hopper
Lola Schnabel
No comments yet