Recommendations of the Editorial team
Once upon a time on the Lower East Side… A writer and director who found the wait for Hollywood too long began making a no-budget indie film in his own neighborhood. At the center was an omniscient narrator who sounded like he had stepped out of a dime novel (“This summer in the city began like any other – just after winter”) and who had a soft spot for the good old days.
Back then, his band 3-Legged Dog was all the rage, and he roamed the streets like a winner. Now he’s just a manic-depressive jerk trying to avoid getting kicked out of his place, filling up jukeboxes in bars and hanging out with guys like his upstairs neighbor, a dropout he calls the Brooklyn Canuck: “Her heart was still in Canada, but her voice belonged in prison.”
The Lower East Side was past its no-wave glory days, but the hipster vibe was still noticeable in the dimly lit clubs, the filthy bars, and the street corner stores. Still, the many “For Rent” signs at the director’s old haunts hinted at where the neighborhood was headed. Or, to quote the anti-hero he came up with: “Around here, the more things change… the more they change.”
First Sundance, then pizzeria
So he grabbed a few actors and an avant-garde filmmaker who also happened to be a brilliant cinematographer and made a film about the place he called home – before he disappeared. The film won an award at Sundance, at a time when the festival was not yet full of red carpets and careerists. A few years later, the Anthology Film Archives gave it a proper theatrical release. Then the guy opened a pizzeria and the film was forgotten.
A wise man once said that every film is a documentary of its own making – and Philip Hartman’s “No Picnic” is a double chronicle: that of a lost paradise and a forgotten era. Of downtown New York in the eighties, of truly independent filmmaking, an alternative world to the “greed is good” craze of that decade. To watch this beautifully grainy black-and-white film from 1987, now back on view thanks to an impressive restoration by the folks at the Film Desk and a premiere at MoMA’s To Save and Project mini-festival, is to return to a moment before gentrification plowed over Alphabet City and pushed out the bohemians.
Noir parable with a vibe
Anyone looking for a compelling plot in this half-hearted attempt at neo-noir may not have fully grasped the concept. There is something like a narrative: protagonist Mac (played by David Brisbin, somewhere between detached and endearingly failed) chases after a woman he only knows from a photo – piercing eyes, contemporary bobbed hair. But Hartman’s idiosyncratic mix of Raymond Chandler’s pulp fiction and Jim Jarmusch’s poetically strolling “Stranger Than Paradise” – only a few years old at the time, but already a milestone in American independent cinema – is above all what is now called a “vibe”: soaked in the monochrome moods that we know from Robert Frank photos and old underground films.
Guest appearances by Richard Hell and Steve Buscemi
Peter Hutton’s camerawork makes everything seem shadowy and strangely inviting at the same time. Details like the neon sign of St. Mark’s Cinema or a poster of Mets third baseman Hubie Brooks (“Hubie Doobie Doo”) above the bathtub in Mac’s kitchen date the film with somnambulistic precision. The Lower East Side’s “Please Kill Me” story is represented by Richard Hell, who contributes a song to the soundtrack and appears in a cameo. The DIY future is embodied by a very young Steve Buscemi as a passerby who unintentionally sends Mac on his search, and an even younger Luis Guzmán as the voice of reason. You’d never guess that this is the same New York that gave us yuppie restaurant Odeon and Patrick Bateman.
Hartman would make just one more film after that: the quirky 1997 indie Eerie, which once again demonstrated his flair for budding talent – Will Arnett and Felicity Huffman are almost unrecognizable as a boat captain and downtown poet, respectively. His real legacy is the founding of Two Boots Pizza, which remains an institution today that connects the Lower East Side’s distant past with its ever-changing present.
“No Picnic” still deserves its place in the larger picture of New York filmmaking. This impetuous Memento mori runs for a week at the Film Forum – a venue that has truly earned its own place of honor in New York cinema history – before embarking on a short tour. Go there before he sneaks away a second time.
