"Guest of Cindy Sherman"

By David Hudson on 03/26/2009

[Updated through 3/30]

"'Guest of Cindy Sherman' fixates on a peripheral nobody residing in the orbit of a somebody, a tack that allows for an intimate, unguarded view of said luminary while simultaneously casting into sharp relief the wrongheadedness of its focus," writes Nick Schager at Screengrab. "Beginning in 1993, Paul H-O made a very minor name for himself as the host of 'Gallery Beat,' an off-the-cuff public access television program in which (as director and host) he attended premiere shows and interviewed artists with an enthusiasm and candor that helped deflate the scene's air of self-importance.... His gig eventually brought him into contact with celebrated photographer Cindy Sherman, who, bucking her usual protocol, let down her media-shy guard for a series of interviews with H-O and, later still, became his girlfriend and the frequent subject of his incessant filming, of which this absorbing yet lacking doc is primarily comprised."

"That the unlikely love affair ended comes as no surprise - H-O's melancholic tone signals it from the outset - but H-O's willingness to tell tales and pop psychologize his ex (visualized by iconic, irrelevant photos of Sherman, in character, huddled in a doorway or peering up from the floor) is shocking," writes Eric Hynes at indieWIRE. "It also justifies Sherman's disassociation from a project she'd apparently encouraged when still dating H-O (yet according to H-O, she also obtained something close to final cut). The more H-O tries to pull Sherman down to size, the larger she looms - as both person and artist - over his life and film."

"Paul's film is part of a subgenre of what you might call exemplary abjection," writes Time art critic Richard Lacayo. "Frederick Exley's novel 'A Fan's Notes' is the classic exmple, about a man obsessed with the distance between his humble self and the godly, real life football hero Frank Gifford. The category reaches another weird zenith with 'U and I,' Nicholson Baker's non-fiction account of his semi-obsessive pursuit of John Updike. But neither one of those guys got to live with the object of their affection. By 2000 Paul H-O is in the door."

"The premise alone sounds too navel-gazing by half," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, "but at its best 'Guest' offers H-O's story as a parable for the universal loss of self that every long-term relationship portends. The film also plays as a kind of easily digestible time capsule of several decades worth of contemporary art, tracking a move towards mass market mania and concurrent, undeniable bleeding of personal idiosyncrasy. Paul H-O enters the story as a party crasher; by the time he exits, it seems there's no longer a party to crash."

"'Guest of Cindy Sherman' is a highly entertaining evisceration and celebration of the milieu," finds Ella Taylor in the Voice. "It's also a fascinating, probably one-sided view of the artist herself, a flirty, put-together looker straight from the J Crew catalog. For a hermit, Sherman sure got out and about to gallery openings when she wasn't inhaling lobster at her house in the Hamptons."

Writing in Slant, Joseph Jon Lanthier finds "unavoidable bias and an unsavory layer of unintentional irony as we watch the filmmaker capturing the violent pop of his own delusional bubble." H-O's "flippancy alienates as readily as it entertains, and when the auteur's luck worsens, a gratingly woe-is-me tone consumes the film - and the Sherman/H-O romance. Did he really think public access infamy would reign eternal?"

"Interviews with a sprinkling of top entertainers - including Eli Broad, Eric Bogosian, Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Danny DeVito, Carol Kane, Christine Vachon, Ingrid Sischy and Molly Ringwald - serve only to amplify Sherman's celebrity and increase the viewer's distance from her." Ariella Gogol in the L Magazine: "Co-director Tom Donahue explicates: 'We wanted to keep a bit of that 'Citizen Kane' quality, to make a film that explores somebody - but you actually have no idea who that person is.'"

"At its best, 'Guest of Cindy Sherman' counters the photo-icon's own work," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Blond, shy Sherman herself looks like underground actress Ellen McElduff, but she flirts like Annie Hall."

Interviews with Paul H-O: C-Monster, Darrell Hartman (Interview) and Michelle Orange (IFC).

Updates, 3/27: "[A]pparently, it's Cindy Sherman ex-lover month at the movies. 'The Feature,' an experimental memoir by Ms Sherman's ex-husband Michel Auder, recently played at Anthology Film Archives," Nathan Lee reminds us in the New York Times. "At once a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse, bittersweet autobiography and witty trip down art-world memory lane, 'Guest of Cindy Sherman' isn't out to settle scores or exploit access, public or otherwise. The only person who comes off looking bad is the eternally peevish Julian Schnabel, one of dozens of luminaries captured (or cornered) by Paul H-O's mirthful camera."

"It all begins to feel tawdry," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club, "especially since Paul H-O never seems to realize that even though he wants everyone to know who he is, he's never given a good reason why we should."

Simon Dumenco chats with Paul H-O for Vulture.

Update, 3/30: "Informative interviews and archival footage make up the first half of the movie, and grating pseudo emo-male explorations of gender dynamics compose the second," writes Paddy Johnson. "This was a movie made to validate [H-O's] own projects and concerns. Were they not quite so superficial, he might have succeeded."

[Photo: "Guest of Cindy Sherman," Trela Media, 2009]

Tags: Cindy Sherman, Guest of Cindy Sherman, Paul H-O