' ' Cinema Romantico: Friday's Old Fashioned: What About Me (1993)

Friday, October 11, 2024

Friday's Old Fashioned: What About Me (1993)


Filmed in black and white 16mm and filmed on and off over the course of a few years, “What About Me” is a living document not only of the DIY scene from which it was born, starring luminaries of the movement like DeeDee Ramone, but of a grubbier, less-gentrified New York’s Lower East Side. It was filmed, I couldn’t help thinking, around the same time as Woody Allen’s also on-location “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” meaning on the same island, and yet it looks a world away. Writer/director/star Rachel Amodeo’s indie is not just a time capsule, however, but a stirring, frightening portrait of homelessness, shot with a quasi-documentary feel belying its rich imagination. “What About Me” begins with a woman in an idyllic countryside dying in a bike accident and then being reborn in suburban New York as a little girl, one promptly left off to the side of the living room by her well-to-do parents, bursting into tears. Amodeo then dissolves from her crying as an infant to crying as a young adult named Lisa Napolitano, orphaned, and living with an aunt who promptly dies. Lisa is then raped and evicted and winds up on the street. 

It is affecting how quickly this happens, and how Amodeo presents it, a rapid series of escalating but matter-of-fact events, a grim portrait of how a person slips through the cracks. One startling image of the Lisa peers down at her from above, through the snowy trees, as she pushes a baby stroller filled with her few possessions, wearing a head scarf, her back to the camera, as if she has aged from 20 to 100 in the blink of an eye. Yet, unexpected humor courses through “What About Me.” Much of it provided in the livewire performance of Richard Edson as her on-again, off-again boyfriend, an actor whom the masses probably know best from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” which imbues his turn here with a brutal irony. Even as Lisa encounters myriad characters, a community never quite emerges as the motivations of these people at the edges of existence are too desperate, too survivalist. When she is helped by two women on the street, they prove to be the same two people who injured her with a motorcycle and fled the scene, a wicked rhyme, your friends as your enemies. 

Given “What About Me’s” reincarnation beginning, I kept envisioning an ending of another rebirth, not so such luck. It concludes with an overpowering image of Lisa sprawled on a bench in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, visually turning the famous Emma Lazarus quote inside-out. What about me? As recent events in America have shown, when it comes to homeless people like her, nobody here really cares. 

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