Smithereens

I saw first 'Smithereens,' a long time ago, at the old Uptown theater in Minneapolis. It was half of a double bill (I don’t recall the other half, but it would have been something like 'Times Square' or maybe 'Blank Generation') and I remember rather liking it. The next time I saw it was on a rental VHS during a party (sort of)—the film was significantly less engaging with people talking over it, standing up to get drinks, and whatever, but interestingly, it still worked on some level because, weirdly, it was kind of like being in the movie; sitting around having the same sorts of BS conversations about half-formed plans (which were, in reality, more like quarter-formed notions) that the characters in the film where having with a bunch of people, some of whom were cool, some who were not (myself), and some of whom were in various intermediary stages of caring about 'coolness.' Most recently, I watched the film, projected and with a live Q&A with director Susan Seidelman afterwards — and, lemme tell you, 'Smithereens' is a pretty wonderful film. Susan Berman is fabulous is all the ways her character aims to be, Richard Hell is absolutely magnetic, and Brad Rijn, while certainly not as showy, serves brilliantly as a less-cool hanger-on (filling the role of an audience surrogate) who doesn’t quite fit into the world in which he's found himself. The revolving cast of bit players, many of whom only appear for one or two scenes, is almost uniformly brilliant, particularly the incredible scene with Katherine Riley as the egg-eating prostitute with a scar 'in a really innerestin' place.' It’s worth commenting too, I think, that this is also a film with a female lead who lives around the edges of 'society' (she’s not a street kid, but just short of) but whom the film never places in any gender-based danger. So often characters like Berman's Wren are put through some sort of sexual trauma which they then must overcome, compartmentalize, or otherwise deal with, and which then become that character's defining motivation (what's this 'victim' going to do now?). Here, you never get to the sense that Wren will allow herself to be defined by any one action or aspect of her existence; while she may make mistakes, this woman is absolutely the author of her own future and that's kind of an astonishing thing to see in the early '80s—and kind of appalling that it's still so surprising and refreshing now.