I Shot Andy Warhol
In its Australian-premiering 4K restoration, Mary Harron’s fictionalised portrait of radical-feminist avenger Valerie Solanas still aims truly at manufactured cool and exploitative notoriety.
On 3 June 1968, writer Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor) walks into Andy Warhol’s Factory, points a handgun at the art superstar and fires three times. Previously, Valerie has been introduced – along with her notorious man-hating polemic, the SCUM Manifesto – to the Factory demimonde. She sees fellow iconoclasts; Warhol sees satirical performance art; Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias sees profitable controversy. But Valerie’s abusive past has made her both urgently ambitious and hyper-alert to exploitation, and she suspects that Girodias has been conspiring against her with Warhol – who becomes, in her eyes, a valid target for her rage.
Many debates about gender and celebrity have raged since Mary Harron’s astonishing debut feature screened at MIFF 1996, but the complex agency the film grants its protagonist still blows most biopics away. Harron meticulously researched Warhol’s Factory in consultation with its key living figures; but rather than further mythologising its glamour, she emphasises the hollowness of its artifice – a theme she’d revisit in her stylish American Psycho (MIFF 2000). Featuring a score by avant-garde legend John Cale and a stunning cast including Jared Harris, Martha Plimpton and Michael Imperioli – as well as indie band Yo La Tengo standing in for The Velvet Underground – I Shot Andy Warhol returns after a long absence from screens as a vivid, timely provocation.
“As unexpected as it is riveting … an exemplary and dynamic work that goes about as far as a narrative film can in both analyzing a complex personality and portraying a cultural scene.” – Variety
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