Cinema: To Be Young, Gifted and Broke

Three shoestring movies tilt at the Hollywood system

Going to an independent American film can be like watching an event in the Special Olympics. Handicapped by budgets as low as $50,000 (when the average Hollywood movie costs more than $10 million), struggling with unknown actors and make-do shooting schedules, independent films demand the viewer's rooting interest to see them over the rough spots and through the inevitable longueurs. Indulgence has its own rewards though. When independent films clear their high hurdles, they can point to new ways of looking at both cinema and American life and demonstrate that film has other pleasures to offer than giddy farce and teenpix thrills.

Susan Seidelman's Smithereens, made for $100,000, is a cautionary tale of the Manhattan punk milieu in the tradition of such '60s films as Shadows and The Connection. Its 19-year-old heroine, Wren (Susan Berman), has seen it all, done most of it, learned nothing. Outfitted in punk khaki — checker-rimmed dark glasses, red sneakers, ornamental bruise on her arm — Wren crashes the Peppermint Lounge and puts the make on new wave musicians, who pay about as much attention to her as they would to the framed landscape on a motel-room wall. This Piaf-size waif has big, gaudy dreams; what she gives and gets is 24-hours-a-day pain, as stark and grating as a dentist's drill.

Sliding from pathos to pathology and back again, Smithereens has the judgmental attitudes of a Hollywood "expose" with little of the craft. For every quirky glimpse of street life (a ten-year-old boy running a three-card monte scam, a prostitute who will "show you my scar for $5"), there is a derisive stereotype of the working-class drudges who get in Wren's way. Wren is so determinedly self-destructive that it becomes hard to care about her fate. Nonetheless, Berman does her best to bring this tough, tart Irma la Douce to life. She and Brad Rinn, as a naive Montana boy who offers Wren vagrant hope of regeneration, snipe amusingly at each other, as if they were the Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon of the Lower East Depths.

In Vortex, the milieu is not punk but the sensibility is. The film-making couple known as Scott B and Beth B have worked in the New York new wave underground since the mid-'70s, shooting on Super 8 stock and exhibiting the results in punk nightclubs. Vortex, made in 16 mm on an $80,000 budget, is their first shot at the relatively big time. Its plot is standard sleuthing in the corridors of power. A Congressman has been killed on orders from a reclusive plutocrat (Bill Rice). Private Eye Angel Powers (Lydia Lunch) finds the source of the trouble in Anthony Demmer (James Russo), a tirading troglodyte in a three-piece suit who has made a pathetic slave of the billionaire. While muttering such maxims as "Truth is a dead man's secret," Angel zigzags through encounters with craven executives, junkies and a malevolent dwarf bartender toward a fatal rooftop rendezvous with Demmer.