Smithereens (Susan Seidelman, 1982)

Susan Berman in Smithereens

Cast: Susan Berman, Brad Rijn, Richard Hell, Nada Despotovich, Roger Jett, Kitty Summerall, Joni Ruth White, D.J. O'Neill, Joel Rooks, Pamela Speed, Tom Cherwin, Edie Schecter. Screenplay: Susan Seidelman, Ron Nyswaner, Peter Askin. Cinematography: Chirine El Kadem. Production design: Franz Harland. Film editing: Susan Seidelman. Music: Glenn Mercer, Bill Million.

Smithereens is at least a documentary of attitude, a portrait of a moment in the history of youth. It aspires to the lasting achievement of the early French New Wave, to become the punk era's Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) or The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959). If it doesn't reach those heights, it's only because Godard and Truffaut got there first, and Susan Seidelman's film can only feel like an echo of them in spirit. But it can also transcend them because its protagonist, like its director, is a woman: Susan Berman's Wren displays a gutsiness and vulnerability inaccessible to Godard's Michel Poiccard and Truffaut's Antoine Doinel. Made for chicken feed on 16mm in the crumbling Manhattan of the early 1980s, it set Seidelman on a path to the big time, though it can also be argued that she never again quite displayed the ingenuity and intensity of vision that she shows in Smithereens.