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Edie in Ciao! Manhattan Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 8 Reviews)

Celluloid heroes never really die
The two Edie Sedgwicks in this shambling sprawl of a film tell me everything I need to know about what happens when you repeatedly apply hard drugs to a young mind. Not good.
Eyelash Edie of the Factory days in the mid 60s was a jangly amphetamine doll, and implant Edie of barely three years later, after she had been ousted from the silver clouds and sent packing back to SoCal...ouch. She looked like a bobble head version of herself.
I read Edie: An American Biography when it came out in hardcover in 1982 before I had seen Ciao, and the book devoted several pages on the production, so I kind of knew what to expect, but of course to see the players in action...sigh. The original movie teaser promised "Speed. Madness. Flying Saucers." That's about right.
Lasting images: Ms. Berlin injecting speed in the toilet stall, screaming and blowsy...Edie plumped out, vacant and trying to dance...Paul America in New York driving a car out of a scene and (knowing this from reading Edie) he just kept on driving to California, stoned out of his mind...
For me, maybe the the last scene in the film is the most moving, where the young man sees Edie's obit in the newspaper and flinches away in sadness and embarrassment--
The lady might be dead but her influence floats on...
Also...
http://www.nypress.com/15/14/books/books.cfm

100 viewings ain't enough !
This no doubt is a strange film. If the theme of Zappa's 200 Motels was that touring can make you crazy, this film is definitely the flipside... DRUGS can make you crazy, ruin your career, put you in a nuthouse and inevitably kill you..... here we are in the flip side of the psychadelic 60's... the methadonic and dexatronic 70's... but the psychadelic daze pervails...

The director described Ciao as an OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND FILM... meaning that it is framed into a story with an actual plot and chractors and doesn't last 12 hours... In fact some of the dialogue and images in this film make it more of a cult classic (with its repeatable lines and dialogues) than a true "underground" film in which case it might have had statements to make, but wouldn't have necessarily been entertaining or rewatchable. Whatever, despite its flaws and the fact that at one point it was becoming the neverending film for the director and production crew as Edie and crew went AWOL for months, weeks days and years on end, it turned out great... it fact the film is so well edited and strung together you don't really realize that it was patch paste and capture scenes as you go until after you're told so... then admittedly it becomes quite obvoius.. -- Made over a 5 year period... you can really feel the colorful 70s when its the 70s and the mod (yet black and white) 60s when its the 60s... and everything blends together... In many ways the film reminds me of Zappa's 200 MOTELS... by the time its over you might feel as drugged out and dazed as many of the charactors, yet the charactors are so memorabe and the story so bizarre you watch it over and over again...

Despite the obvoius bad taste left in some Edie Sedgwick fans who realize that this film in many ways is a documentary of her fall and final days and might even arguably exploit it, on a level of entertainment and engagement this film is one of the all time most memorable... with the cartoonish "Dr. Roberts" sequences being a particular delight to cult movie fans... (*anybody remember the time when Junkie doctors like that were actually common ???)

For True Edie Fans Only!!!
First things first, this movie makes NO sense whatsoever. If you can ignore that little tidbit, you can make it through this movie with no problem. Having a backstory to this movie (how it was made and why it seems to span years...it does!) will also help in understanding it. Basically Ms Sedgwick started filming this flick when she was on her 16th minute of her 15 minutes of fame. After disappearing from New York (where filming started) due to drug abuse, the filmmakers tried to salvage footage and shoot around their star in hopes of finishing the "first aboveground underground film". According to the filmakers (who do a wonderful job of commentary on this dvd), they found Edie about three years later in California still drugged out and fried from shock treatments. Going against conventional logic, they began filming again but, this time with a new cast (notably Roger Vadim) and a new storyline (using that word loosely). Not wanting to waste the black and white footage shot of Edie and other Warhol Superstars some years earlier, they intergrated black and white footage with color footage shot with rehabing Edie. The story isn't suppose to be "The Edie Sedgwick Story" but it's based on her life and her constant obession with pills, her modeling days and herself. One might wonder why any self respecting person would put all the disgusting elements of their lives out there for the world to consume and willingly act them out as if they had no idea it was their life. The plotline is besotted with conspiarcy theories of aliens, flying saucers and (of course) drugs. The whole point of this movie is suppose to be that a drifter played by some dude with the worst Southern accent since Viven Leigh in "A Streetcar Named Desire", drifts into Susan's (Edie) life not knowing how much Edie's "very public freakout in the 1960s" has influenced his own devil may care attitude about life. Again, unless you know the backstory, none of this would be apparent. This film is basically Edie's slow death. The scenes that play out are erriely foretelling of Edie's tragic demise. Even though you know that Edie didn't stick around, you still hope that she'll clean up her act before the end of the movie. Sadly, she never does. She died during post production and the filmmakers tacked on an ending (I'm guessing she didn't die in the original ending) to tie up loose ends of a life that wasn't never tied in the first place. The finally flashback scene of Edie's actual wedding to a fellow rehab patient is shown followed by her real obit in the New York Post. A sad ending to a sad story.

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