The basic import of Susanna Nicchiarelli‘s Nico, 1988 (Magnolia, 7.4) is that the legendary ice-cool Nico — deep-voiced, stone-faced, Teutonic doom-chanter — was a greater artist in her heroin-habit decline period (late ’70s to late ’80s) than she was in her breakout period (mid ’60s to early ’70s). And that’s fine — a valid analysis of her songwriting and performing career.
But the film itself is slow, irksome, repetitive, sometimes vague and too often dull. Nicchiarelli makes her points, but the beat-by-beat watching of this 93-minute film is mostly unsatisfying. To me anyway. I checked my watch four or five times.
Everything I’ve always loved about Nico, musically-speaking, was the stuff she was unhappy with. She said over and over that her true musical identity and vision came into being only after her late ’60s Velvet Underground phase (“Femme Fatale”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, “I’ll Be Your Mirror”) and after “Chelsea Girl“, which she hated the arrangements for.
Heroin-habit Nico in 1985.
So fine — Nico only came into her own when she started writing and performing her own gloom-rock material. I’m sure that was true. Except I’ve never listened to her gothy downswirl stuff, but I love “Chelsea Girl” and the 1967 banana album. Does that make me a serf or an asshole? I don’t think so.
Last September the Venice Film Festival elite creamed over Nico, 1988, but what else is new? You can’t trust critics when it comes to personal-vision indie cinema because they almost always give films like Nico, 1988 a pass, in part because they don’t want to be the naysaying stand-out. Maybe you can’t trust Hollywood Elsewhere either, but at least I deal straight cards.
Nico, 1988 is more into moods and atmospheres than particulars and specifics, and so the first thing you do after it’s over is go online to learn what actually happened on a chapter-by-chapter basis. That’s what I did after it ended. Only after I read everything about Nico’s declining years did the film start to come together in my head.
There’s a short scene in which Nico and her band visit the site of the Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg but Nicchiarelli doesn’t want to identify the location because that would be tedious and unhip, and so it becomes a scene about the band visiting an old concrete stadium of some kind…who cares? The whole movie is like that. You can feel or least sense what’s happening, but Nicchiarelli often declines to fill in the blanks.
Nico’s life ended in ’88 while staying in Ibiza. She suffered a heart attack, fell off a bicycle, hit her head and died of a cerebral hemmorhage. Nichiarelli doesn’t depict this, of course, but you can’t help but wonder “well, why not?”
The film tells us that Nico’s son Ari (his father was Alain Delon) tried to kill himself while the band was on tour. Ari had a heroin problem of his own, but the film provides no hint as to why he would try to off himself, and there’s nothing online that mentions a suicide attempt. It just happens and then he recovers. So why did…forget it, sorry I asked.
