A silver lipstick stained blueprint to the "Big Come Down" era, Ciao Manhattan is, by technical standards, very bad. Though the color sequences are well photographed and the older clips seem well reproduced, the narrative is clumsy and the sound is choppy. This doesn't bother me and whereas, I would like to see a coherent documentary on Edie, the flaws of the film are perfect alongside the flawed characters in the film. It possesses a very paranoid, broken and detached quality that is in keeping with a certain sub genre that has grown over the ensuing years. In music, it's everything low-fi since the LP, The Velvet Underground & Nico(1967). In film-making, it's any art film since Andy Warhol's Empire(1964).
The film is, quite by incident, the very quintessence of the dangers of mixing cinema verity lifestyle with a diet of tablets which include a total disregard for the wages of sin, in favor of "really living". (i.e. on film, on drugs and off reality). What illustrates this is that Susan(Edie)isn't really acting in this film, but seems to be fooling herself (with coaxing from the filmmakers, no doubt) into thinking that she is, simply because, she's using the name Susan and is probably on LSD most of the time. It's a kind of twisted defense mechanism that Edie is using to distance herself from her own personal reality. This is ironic, considering the fact that her personal reality is the focus of the entire film and that her(Edie's) own mortal coil is unraveling faster then footage can record it. But, the cameras are tenacious and keep rolling thru her staged shock treatments(a true event) to her "last chance at a normal life" marriage(a true event captured on 8mm complete with a Warholsque posterized sequence) and finally a news clipping of her obituary.
The film serves well as a cautionary tale to the contemporary modern girl, with Susan(Edie) as the prototype modern girl, trying anything new, without regard to the consequences. i.e. forced stardom, derelict emotions, mood management drugs, radical psychotherapy techniques and even a botched breast job. This has all become a common lifestyle today(in 2006), perfected by time and human casualty. Susan(Edie) was an incidental trailblazer in a film(lifestyle) where the sun shines too white hot for human beings to bare it, yet is too intoxicating for the obsessive ones to turn away from. Like a pretty, lactose intolerant, lab rat that keeps eating the cheese in spite of the gas pains, Susan(Edie) was caught in a maze of learned behavior and couldn't resist it's unhealthy escapism's, even though she must have felt the grim reaper's hand on her emaciated shoulder. As long as she was feeding her head and all eyes where on her, she really lived. She only "snuffed it" after filming had concluded and she was faced the realism of a sober, off camera existence.
The book "Edie, An American Biography" is required reading if you want to get the most out of this film and may be all you can take. *Not for the mentally squeamish.
