ROY EDROSO

Margarita Happy Hour, a film by Ilya Chaikin. Produced by Michael Ellenbogen and Susan Leber. Starring Eleanor Hutchins and Larry Fessenden.

Watching the new independent feature Margarita Happy Hour (opens March 22) I was moved to recall the historical process by which the East Village became a film signifier called "The East Village."

In the late 1970s I used to attend screenings in downtown lofts and storefronts, where all us cheerlessly cheerful punks drank beer out of brown paper bags and watched grainy, badly-dubbed 8 mm epics by Amos Poe, Nick Zedd, Vivienne Dick, et al., in which graffiti was deified, bohemianism reified, and Lydia Lunch sodomized.

I remember with particular fondness one ambitiously minimalist opus called Rome '78, featuring local punks dressed up in Roman togas. It was like Spartacus written, directed, and performed by heroin addicts with Fine Arts degrees. Actors wandered listlessly against white backdrops, occasionally summoning the strength to wanly project some attitude. "We have no art," declaimed one hollow-eyed wraith meant to be, I guess, a follower of Diogenes. "All our art is terrible--look at this." He held up a Pottery Barn vase, then dropped it to the floor before eventually mumbling his way through another seemingly endless stretch of silver nitrate.

Unless these people actually were perpetually high, this alternative cinema--we didn't have "indie" film yet, kids--was not intended to fetch development money from the mainstream. It was purposefully static, cheesy, and unpleasant. That was most of its charm. In fact, it was all of its charm. And most charmlessly charming of all was the absence of any moral conclusion to lift us out of the comforting malaise of these sordid entertainments. "No resolution" was the cinematic equivalent of the Sex Pistols' "no future."

Then at the close of the era, Susan Seidelman pushed her slick little fleur du mal, Smithereens, through the Hollywood concrete. NYU film school was as close to the punk cinema scene as Seidelman actually got, but she captured the East Village aroma--with most of the original, acrid Galouises-and-garbage traces filtered out--and sprayed it all over her movie; and the smell managed reach all the way out to the hinterlands.

Smithereens had scenes of punk posturing, sort of like the original punk films had, but choreographed and punchlined so straight audiences could get some yuks out of them. One might say that Smithereens did for punks what Craig Russell's Outrageous! did for cross-dressers: USDA-approved them for suburban consumption.

What really sold Smithereens, though, was its coming-of-age angle. It showed a callow punk princess trying to make it big in a downtown scene. Try as she might, she couldn't do it--because the scene was fake, and the more she tried to fit into it, the more of a fake she became. Smithereens thus assumed a moral dimension--one tailor-made for the punk-averse destination audience. At its denouement, Seidelman showed the unmoored heroine drifting toward West Side Highway trick-turning. The trick really being turned, of course, was on the viewers. They were dangled over the squalid pit of wild youth, then pulled back at the close and told that they had done well to observe this tragedy from the safe distance provided by the filmmakers.

The franchise progressed quickly after that. Seidelman hit a jackpot with Desperately Seeking Susan, largely thanks to Madonna, who for a few crucial years thereafter was America's acceptable face of la vie boheme, gasket-bracelet and leather-gantlet division. Then came Turk 182 and Breakin' and all those ridiculous movies that established the bohemian signifier for years to come: wild, dangerous, fun to look at, and not for any normal, self-respecting person.

The advent of indie film altered the formula only slightly. As more alternative communities sprang up in the image of the East Village, glorious bohemian waste became less site-specific. For example, one could rot away, for a brief running-time, at Steve Buscemi's Tree's Lounge, located in a leafily desolate prole suburb, but still get the same yuks from colorful wastrels (now considerably older and mangier than in previous editions, as befit the demographic trends of film slackerdom) and, at the end of the day, still shake one's head sadly at the horrible things that would befall any poor chump actually mired in such soullessly bleak surroundings.

Ilya Chaiken's Margarita Happy Hour, the most recent bohemian coming-of-age film, is in many ways a great advance on the formula. It's set in New York City, but mostly in those neighborhoods where aging slackers might really be found: Brooklyn's south Slope and the frayed edges of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens. The squalor feels right: large apartments that still look shitty even after the dishes are washed, and are never big enough to accommodate all the people that wind up crashing in them. The slackers themselves are also well-observed, funny and poignant. The central couple, Zelda (Eleanor Hutchins, who looks like Courtney Cox without any money) and Max (Larry Fessenden--the new Steve Buscemi! You read it here ninety-first!), squabble and fuck with the authentic, languid desperation of couples who've been stuck together too long to quit each other easily.

The most obvious impediment to that course of action is also refreshingly realistic: Max and Zelda have a baby. In fact, most of Zelda's female friends have babies, and the Happy Hour of the title is the recurring fun-drink-fueled bitchfest at a sidewalk cafe where the pierced 'n' tattooed mommies cheerfully unload their discontent while cradling or stroller-rocking their young 'uns. Freedom is still as big a deal for them as it is for younger bohos, but their kids mitigate it--not because they're physically in the way (everyone still drinks and parties), but because they demand a deeper commitment than these adults are used to making. "We've lost the freedom to just die," Zelda says with some longing.

And so on and, eventually, so what. Relationships go through mild changes, and shit happens; but most of the film is reiterations of how fucked up everything is: random violence; drugs; an "installation" (hey, I know that club, says the urban filmgoer) presided over by a guy in a sparkly bow tie and evil leer; and mutterings, more or less poetic, about how there's got to be something better than this.

Chaiken's put a lot of gorgeously bleak detail into this thing, Gordon Chou's photography makes even the sunlight seem unpromising, and the actors have both the pallor and the swagger of marginal living down cold. (I especially liked Holly Ramos as one of those hippie junkies to whom heroin grants eternal girlishness, and Barbara Sicuranza as a hard case whose various hurts are only amplified by her toughness.) But there's not a lot happening until we get to the moral of the story--and to a veteran of this sort of entertainment, the moral is a pro-forma, uplifting downer: Zelda, ass-kicked by the death of a friend, takes her baby and gets the hell out, in a van with a bunch of her buddies, to some alternative scene I couldn't get quite straight (overlapping dialogue, murky sound). The girls even grab a bunch of brightly-colored balloons to trail out the shotgun window as they speed through the Holland Tunnel to...to what? What's changed? Zelda is quit of her wastrel boyfriend, and of the city (which, here as in all such entertainments, represents to our heroine nothing except scenic locales and access to deadly drugs), but is that all there is to it? What does getting out mean to someone who hasn't expressed a positive thought (apart from gnomicisms like "I'm tired of circles, I want a straight line") through the entire movie?

One might say that Zelda's escape is in fact the filmmaker's: Yes, I know all about this rootless existence, but hey, I'm no loser. I made a feature-length motion picture! But perhaps the real escape is the audience's--in the opposite direction. Perhaps viewers will line up for a chance to peep once more into the entertainingly sordid demimonde, and leave the theatre comforted that nothing so ugly has touched their lives; or if it has--if they, too, bear tattoos, children by fucked-up consorts, scars physical or emotional--that they have escaped to--what? To an ashram? To a better-paying job? To a comfortable suburban home equipped with a lavish entertainment center that plays over and over the gnarly tunes of their (and/or their children's) unhappy youth, and pumps in via cable channels similar narratives of unhealthy urbanites (Sara Jessica Parker slick or Steve Buscemi rough) over which they can endlessly cluck their tongues, and from which they can gloatingly retreat, satisfied with their choices until a nameless longing again overtakes them and drives them to hear and view again the dirty stories that tell how lucky they are not to be what they cannot look away from?

"No future" was perhaps the right idea. Because it isn't the future if it keeps happening over and over again.