The documentary Guest of Cindy Sherman is the unchallenged hot-gossip item of the Tribeca festival. The film, which credits Paul H-O (that's "Paul Hasegawa-Overacker" to his mama) and Tom Donahue as co-directors, uses a lot of footage from Gallery Beat, a New York public-access show that Paul H-O starred in during the 1990s, applying a snarky, "in" tone to coverage of the local art scene. Over the years, Paul — I don't really feel comfortable acting as if I'm on a first-name basis with the guy, but I'd just feel silly calling him "H-O" — became an accepted fixture of the New York art scene from barging into galleries on opening nights and shoving a microphone into people's faces, which may say something about how small and in-bred the scene is, though some would probably insist that it says something about how important New York public access broadcasting was in its glory days. Anyway, after the art star Cindy Sherman agreed, to the surprise of everyone, Paul included, to appear on the show, she and Paul became a couple, to the flabbergasted bewilderment of everyone, Paul included. All seemed to be going well in Paul's world for quite a while, as well it might, considering that Sherman was rich, acclaimed, beautiful, sweetly nurturing, and to judge from the photographic evidence available here, has aged less in the past twenty years than Paul has in the last two. But Paul, who had tried to crash the scene by making his own career as an artist before public access called out his name, felt increasingly self-conscious about the fact that his significant other was a big, big deal and he was a measly little nobody. (To give him his due, it does sound as if this situation was brought to his attention through some pretty cringe-worthy slights.)
Work began on the film when the two were still together, and there must have been a point when Sherman at least gave the impression of wanting to encourage Paul to make it; otherwise, it seems doubtful that the filmmakers would have had such easy access to many of the interview subjects who've worked with, or for, Sherman. But by the time the documentary was finished they'd broken up--or, as Paul puts it, he was "downsized" out of her life--and in the movie itself, Paul muses that Sherman may have begun to feel differently about his little make-work film project after it dawned on her that someone might actually see it. The film attracted considerable buzz in the days leading up to its first Tribeca screening, and this past week Sherman herself sent out a disclaimer: "As my name is in the title and my work and self are so abundantly represented, I would like to counter any assumption that I am or wish to be personally associated with it. I am not a participant in any events related to the film's screenings in this festival or future presentations. I apologize to all those who participated, thinking they were doing me a favor in giving interviews and otherwise assisting in the fabrication of this film. Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at it's inception."
It's easy to sympathize with Sherman's queasiness over having her ex-boyfriend showing their home movies in theaters and charging admission, but it must be said that Guest of Cindy Sherman adds up to more than a public display of ungentlemanly behavior. Sherman herself actually comes out pretty well in it, both as a person and as a counterweight to the preening macho men with whom she competed for attention in the 1980s, such as Julian Schnabel (seen here in an especially ludicrous clip from an old British TV documentary) and Robert Longo (who's glimpsed in an old TV interview wearing a hairdo that looks like an H. R. Giger creation that's eating his head). Paul himself comes across as a likable jerk and a schnorrer, with a surprisingly sharp grasp of who the trendy, market-driven art scene of the '80s and '90s worked. (The falsest touch, and the part of the movie that most smells of bad faith, has nothing to do with Sherman and their relationship: it's an eleventh-inning lament that Paul delivers about the hollow, corrupted values of the art scene today. It's not that what he says is wrong so much as that nothing you've seen up to that point has convinced you that he ever actually cared that much about art for itself. I do believe that he cared about Sherman, though; the movie may feel painfully personal to those whose lives he documents, but it's in no way a slag job. And maybe because of the discretion that Paul himself shows in his depiction of Sherman, she retains her distance from the camera; at the end she seems attractive, likable, even hard to resist, but essentially, mysteriously unknowable, while Paul is happy to cariacture himself as an insecure party crasher who got lucky, for a while. For all its flair and smart talk, Guest of Cindy Sherman ends on a note of genuine sadness and loss.