CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Produced by Jen Gatien & David D. Wasserman
Re-enactments written by Christ Zoist, David Linter and Mr. Ferrara
Released by Aliquot Films
USA. 88 min. Not Rated  
 

Certain moments in a film are so descriptive of the entire mood that they feel like summations. Three-quarters of the way through Abel Ferrara’s new documentary Chelsea on the Rocks, Stanley Bard, the former manager of the Chelsea Hotel, takes Milos Forman on a tour of the building. Bard was responsible for creating the Chelsea’s bohemian reputation and allowing many artists, filmmakers, and actors to stay at the hotel cheaply or for free. Forman had lived there for a period in the ’70s, and while they are walking through the halls, he recalls an old woman that lived in a particular apartment.

While cooking dinner, the woman left the stove unattended and accidentally fell asleep. While no fire started, there was a deluge of smoke. The firefighters, upon arriving, could not see into the apartment, and not knowing if there was a fire or not, inundated the apartment, drowning the old woman in the process. The retelling is played for laughs.

This moment of ironic detachment permeates the film. An old woman dying for no reason is tragic, but if you look at it from a distance, if you refuse to accept the emotional value of her death, then the moment can be played for any feeling at all. For Ferrara, this scene is colored through a desire to be deemed coolly irreverent, if not hip, and thus a sense of the inside and an outside are created. Those inside are the knowing, the ironically detached—represented in the very form of the film itself. There are no IDs for the interviews. One is in the know or one is not, and the very setting cements this insularity. Except for a scene or two from the sidewalk out front, the viewer is stuck inside for 88 minutes. Those inside are the cool bohemians, and they stand in contrast to the lumpen masses outside. 

In this same vein, the actual story of interest—the takeover of the Chelsea by corporate interests and what that means for the artists that live there and who have been supported for so many years by Bard—is left in the margins in favor of the superficial nostalgia over sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. For a hotel that housed Twain, Nabokov, and Burroughs among its many residents, one thinks there would be a more robust history to draw from, but interviewee after interviewee merely recounts their Chelsea party days in incredibly banal detail. One can’t help but wonder if Ferrara’s goal is to live it up one last time rather than actually fete the reason for the hotel’s supposed existence: to create an oasis where artists work unimpeded by daily worries.

By addressing neither the corporate story nor the hotel’s artistic legacy, Ferrara ends up essentially making a wedding reception video. People pop up to tell their story and wish the hotel well and then it’s on to the next interview or the next melodramatic reenactment. This is all stated not to diminish the accomplishments of the artists who lived in the Chelsea Hotel—many of them have contributed imaginatively to culture—but rather to show that the real story is merely an afterthought, something to be considered when the coke runs out or the orgy dies down. Andy Beckerman
October 2, 2009