**SPOILER ALERT**
It was the first time I've been to a film where the ending credits were the best part of the whole thing - but wait, that's not quite as damning as it sounds. Not quite. Factory Girl is the story of Edie Sedgwick, a stunning young socialite who met Andy Warhol in the early days of the Factory and was known as his muse, for a time they were inseparable.
She was a damaged, brittle young woman who, the filmmakers would have you believe, was utterly exploited by Warhol: for her societal influence in selling his work to affluent clients; for her participation in his movies, which she later believed led to her being ostracised from society because she was laughed at for them; and for her money (she inherited a large trust fund but quickly blew through it and Warhol, who was notoriously parsimonious, allegedly refused to pay her or help her when she was bankrupt). Her father is portrayed as an obnoxious bully who sexually abused her as a child while tormeting her gay brother to suicide.
Her 'look', pale lips and enormous dark eyes, dark dance tights and short dresses became utterly iconic. But she couldn't keep up with the lifestyle and eventually, even after moving out of New York and back to California into rehab, she died of a drug overdose in her late twenties. She was a tragic figure and Sienna Miller plays it brilliantly (who knew she'd ever turn out to be more than a boho clothes horse?) with a real delicacy and you feel genuinely sympathetic towards her. That also may be ramped up the the fact that there's not one other positive character in the film. No, Sid doesn't count because he used her too, setting her up with the-musician-who-we'd-have-to-say-for-legal-reasons-most-certainly-isn't-Bob-Dylan, and the musician-who- dumped her too, though I didn't actually derive that she had been pregnant, which was rumoured to be the reason Dylan was going to sue - over allegations he'd got ES pregnant and insisted she have an abortion?
There's just no heart to this film - a certain amount of style in the costumes and yes, the casting is excellent (though wasn't Mena Suvari a bit underused?) but style doesn't made for substance. Interestingly, there were about twenty people in the cinema when the lights dimmed, and about half walked out at various points in the movie. Was it the overuse of faux-documentary style soft focus? Guy Pearce's eerie yet probably acute portrayal of Warhol? Or the fact that it seemed to be seven minutes of material run over and over and over again? We had three repetitions of the story of abuse - while it may have been crucial, it lost impact. All the dialogue in the final scene was lifted from earlier in the film - and it wasn't that profound the first time around. It felt like the film had grown out of a drunken afternoon's conversation in the pub - 'hey, lez maka moovie' 'Exslent idea, howbut Edie Sedgwick? Posh bird, soup can bloke, junkie?' and then they wrote that down on a beermat and a motion picture was born!
So this was so heading towards "Give me back those hours of my life" (and apparently it's only ninety minutes long?? Seems like days...) and just as we were reaching for our coats when the end credits rolled, a sincere voice starting talking about Edie: her brother. Amazing photographs of her came up on the screen, intercut with talking heads from her brother Jonathan, Nat Finkelstein, Richie Berlin, George Plimpton and other people who knew her. It was then that you sat back, entranced and just wished the filmmakers had cut them into the narrative around Miller's great performance instead of somehow ironing all of the interest out of Edie's sad story. So it gets a reprieve to 'A card movie' simply based on the credits sequence. For that alone. I'm still considering asking for the other 84 minutes though.
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