To Be Young, Gifted and Broke

By RICHARD CORLISS

Three shoestring movies tilt at the Hollywood system

Going to an independent American film can be like watching an event in the Special Olympics. Handicapped by budgets as low as $50,000 (when the average Hollywood movie costs more than $10 million), struggling with unknown actors and make-do shooting schedules, independent films demand the viewer's rooting interest to see them over the rough spots and through the inevitable longueurs. Indulgence has its own rewards though. When independent films clear their high hurdles, they can point to new ways of looking at both cinema and American life and demonstrate that film has other pleasures to offer than giddy farce and teenpix thrills.

Susan Seidelman's Smithereens, made for $100,000, is a cautionary tale of the Manhattan punk milieu in the tradition of such '60s films as Shadows and The Connection. Its 19-year-old heroine, Wren (Susan Berman), has seen it all, done most of it, learned nothing. Outfitted in punk khaki -- checker-rimmed dark glasses, red sneakers, ornamental bruise on her arm -- Wren crashes the Peppermint Lounge and puts the make on new wave musicians, who pay about as much attention to her as they would to the framed landscape on a motel-room wall. This Piaf-size waif has big, gaudy dreams; what she gives and gets is 24-hours-a-day pain, as stark and grating as a dentist's drill.

Sliding from pathos to pathology and back again, Smithereens has the judgmental attitudes of a Hollywood "expose" with little of the craft. For every quirky glimpse of street life (a ten-year-old boy running a three-card monte scam, a prostitute who will "show you my scar for $5"), there is a derisive stereotype of the working-class drudges who get in Wren's way. Wren is so determinedly self-destructive that it becomes hard to care about her fate. Nonetheless, Berman does her best to bring this tough, tart Irma la Douce to life. She and Brad Rinn, as a naive Montana boy who offers Wren vagrant hope of regeneration, snipe amusingly at each other, as if they were the Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon of the Lower East Depths.

In Vortex, the milieu is not punk but the sensibility is. The film-making couple known as Scott B and Beth B have worked in the New York new wave underground since the mid-'70s, shooting on Super 8 stock and exhibiting the results in punk nightclubs. Vortex, made in 16 mm on an $80,000 budget, is their first shot at the relatively big time. Its plot is standard sleuthing in the corridors of power. A Congressman has been killed on orders from a reclusive plutocrat (Bill Rice). Private Eye Angel Powers (Lydia Lunch) finds the source of the trouble in Anthony Demmer (James Russo), a tirading troglodyte in a three-piece suit who has made a pathetic slave of the billionaire. While muttering such maxims as "Truth is a dead man's secret," Angel zigzags through encounters with craven executives, junkies and a malevolent dwarf bartender toward a fatal rooftop rendezvous with Demmer.

The pulse rate of Vortex is as slow and regular as a long-distance runner's. The acting is uneven, from Russo's Method overacting to Lunch's delicious coarseness as she tries to remember her lines. None of this matters much. What does is the look of the film: a downtown gallery of elegant, provocative images. Warning shadows pin actors against the wall. Bedrooms and boardrooms alike are illuminated by lasers, neon, smoke, creepy red and blue filters. Single-source lighting throws every face and motivation into sinister relief. And under the action, jazz-rock music -- a hum of bass, synthesizer and baritone sax -- moves continuously, like a shark in shallow water. To be sure, Vortex engages the eye, not the gut. But for $80,000, an eyes-only feast should be enough.

John Sayles' Lianna (rhymes with Indiana) means to engage the middle-class emotions, then turn them subtly against the audience's expectations. Lianna (Linda Griffiths) has a sweet moonface and blue eyes that always look as if they have just left off crying. She has every reason to be sad: her husband, who teaches film at the local college, is an adulterous grouch; her two children do not offer quite enough challenge; her life is in limbo. So she tumbles into a lesbian affair with her night-school professor, Ruth (Jane Hallaren), to whom fond Lianna is the adoring, precocious student. Is Lianna in love or just restless? Does the affair represent an irrevocable change in her sexual preference or just a detour? Is the discovery of herself worth the loss of family and best friends?

For an intimate realistic portrait like this to come alive, every brush stroke must be telling, precise. It is a delicate matter of nuance and gesture, qualities Sayles meshed perfectly (on a $60,000 budget) in his first independent feature, Return of the Secaucus 7. In the more lavishly budgeted Lianna, everyone at first seems to be trying too hard not to try too hard. But as its heroine discovers resources of wit and self-confidence, the film does too. By the end it has turned a "problem drama" into a social comedy, full of cagey behavioral surprises and a lovely performance by Griffiths. Of all the new non-Hollywood films (this one was shot in Hoboken, N.J.), Lianna is the one most likely to reach and touch a wider audience. Even independent films must be dependent on an adventurous movie public.

-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.