Jason Bailey
We have some history, Ciao! Manhattan and I. This 1972 experimental film first came onto my radar when it appeared as part of a massive program of New York movies on the Criterion Channel in fall of 2021 – just as my book about New York movies, Fun City Cinema (plug plug plug) was appearing in bookstores. I approached it with suspicion, because that’s what you do when someone tells you that you missed something important in a book you spent three years writing and researching. (The “someone,” in this case, is the Criterion Channel’s programmers, and they weren’t “telling” me anything, but y’know, you spend enough time on a project and you start taking these things personally.) And it wouldn’t do me any good to watch it then anyway. I was just starting to realize that, for the rest of my life, I will encounter two things w/r/t this book: 1) movies I somehow knew nothing about and will regret not including in it, and 2) movies that I will be mad came out after I wrote it, because they would’ve fit right in. (In the Heights was a good example of the latter.)
But then I watched Ciao! Manhattan anyway. And it is fascinating.
It opens with a deceptively simple bit of on-screen text: “Three months after the completion of filming, Edie Sedgwick, who portrays herself in the role of Susan, suddenly died at the age of 28. We dedicate this motion picture to her memory.” If you skim it, there’s nothing unusual here; actors die in the period between completion of photography and arrival in theaters all the time, and the dedication of the posthumous production is de rigeur. It’s that phrasing: Sedgwick “portrays herself in the role of Susan.” The pieces of this phrase seem to cancel each other out; is she portraying herself, or is she playing the role of Susan?
But the film itself answers that question with, in essence, the “why not both?” meme. Edie Sedgwick is playing “Susie Superstar,” yes, but that is a character in a situation that is identical to herself, within the facts of her life. Sedgwick was as a key figure in Andy Warhol’s Factory scene in the early 1960s, appearing in several of his films as a version/variation/persona of herself (most notably in Poor Little Rich Girl). But when she attempted to established herself as an independent figure and actress, things fell apart; there were years of addiction and hospitalization, and then she returned to the West Coast in 1970. Two years later she was dead at 28.
The messy origins of the picture are betrayed in its storytelling. The directors, John Palmer and David Weisman, began shooting an experimental film starring Sedgwick during her mid-‘60s Factory heyday. (Both were part of the Warhol orbit; Palmer is credited as co-director of Empire, Warhol’s notorious 485-minute film consisting of a single shot of the Empire State Building.) When she returned to California in 1970, Palmer and Weisman tossed their original script and came up with a new scenario, with Edie’s “Susie” recovering – or, more accurately, retreating – in California.
Thanks, presumably, to the shifting tides of cinema and tastes of art film audiences, the reimagined Ciao apes the ambling-weirdo aesthetic of Easy Rider – it’s messy, experimental, and declamatory, sometimes clumsy, but never less than compelling. The new material, shot in richly saturated color, takes an an entry point Wesley Hayes’ Butch, a Texas boy who picks Susie up, hitchhiking, half-nude and barely conscious. He takes her back to her family estate, where she lives in a tent in the pool, surrounded by ephemera from her brief period of fame. “I’m preparing a portfolio of friends and acquaintances I knew in New York during my modeling career,” she explains, which launches the film back to 1965, and back into black-and-white. (When California Susie telephones people in New York, they’re still in black and white – a witty and inspired visual choice.)
Palmer and Weisman capture numerous gorgeous, seemingly on-the-fly images of ‘60s New York, yet her understandably cynical perspective keeps the picture from romanticizing the time. “That whole scene was full of shit,” she explains, not even angrily, just off-handedly. It certainly seems to have done a number on her, and not just based on the stark contrast in appearance; even taking out the switch from her iconic, short, white-blonde cut to her long brunette locks, she truly seems a different person (“Did you really used to look like that?” Butch asks, gazing on her old photos).
But there’s never a question of her identity, and, true to that opening text, no real separation between her and the character. “No matter where I’ve been, I’ve been quite notorious,” she tells Butch. “I’ve never been anywhere where I wasn’t known.” The old footage of Edie and her fellow Factory kids acting out a barely-veiled version of their own zonked-out existence is accompanied by audio of interviews in 1970, not terribly lucid, certainly not making any effort to pretend that the Susie of this story and the Edie portraying her are not one and the same. More disturbingly, as she rants, dances, strips, and carries on, barely standing up, it does not feel like acting, and there’s some question as to whether these filmmakers were standing by impassively as this woman self-immolated.
“It sure is one hell of a shame to see the little gal just go downhill like this!” exclaims “Mister Verdecchio,” the powerful old “tycoon” and all-purpose villain of the piece, but we first see him looking like something more personal: the director in the cutting room, surveying the documented wreckage of this ingenue’s life. Butch puts a more nuanced point on it: “It’s just like she’s inside her own lil’ bitty world, all by herself.”
Ciao! Manhattan was all but ignored in its initial release, and neither Weisman nor Palmer would continue to work in this vein; Palmer would go back to his career as a British camera and crew guy, putting together a resume that stretched from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to Shaun of the Dead, while Weisman would make his bones as a producer (he was the key player in the slice-and-dice job that led to grindhouse audiences first seeing the Lone Wolf and Cub movies in the form of 1980’s Shogun Assassin). Now, the picture’s main function is as a testament to Edie Sedgwick’s incredible charisma and beauty and, yes, acting chops – not just in the scenes where she is playing a character, but in the scenes where she’s being herself, because by that time, being herself was playing a role. The picture ends with documentary footage of her real wedding. She looks so healthy and happy. And four months later, she was gone.
”Ciao! Manhattan” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
