Dangerous curves.

Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's High Art goes beyond feel-good lesbian movies with a dark, sophisticated story that grabs and won't let go

High Art arrives in theaters this month, trailing credentials that 1 range from the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance to a Directors Fortright slot at the Cannes Film Festival. It just might be the film that wins the lesbian crossover success sweepstakes. A smart and stylish movie about lesbians, heroin, and the art world, High Ad is a remarkably assured debut. Its confidence is impressive, given that it had its origins in a screenwriting project at Columbia University, where a young lesbian writer-director by the name of Lisa Cholodenko was mentored by writing professors Brendan Ward and Milos Forman.

Cholodenko found inspiration all around her when she moved to New York. Originally a Valley Girl--from Encino, Calif., no less--she came of age via college in San Francisco and a few years of globe-trotting, including a stint with her then-girlfriend in Israel. She even did time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant editor and slowly moving up the Hollywood ladder until she began to feel trapped, read about "the new queer cinema" in New York, and vowed to try her luck.

Cholodenko claims that she "felt naive and wide-eyed" when she arrived as a lesbian greenhorn in Gotham: "It was 1992, and heroin chic was all around." She remembers the Calvin Klein JUST BE campaign as vividly as the day she found herself at MoMA staring at photographer Larry Clarke's I image of a pregnant junkie shooting up--or the moment she was inspired I by the retrospective of Nan Goldin photographs at the Whitney. She wondered why so many lesbians she knew suddenly had access to cheap, clean heroin and thought it was hip.

"I'm too uptight to go there," the 33-year-old filmmaker demurs when asked whether she herself got into the heroin experience. She got hooked instead on her fascination with the whole scene. The lesbian art world, drug culture, interpersonal power plays, careerism--all became material for her screenplay. The result is a sophisticated look at a universe that's about as far away from other lesbian films as you can imagine.

Consider High Art, then, a catalog of early--'90s fascinations, a la Cholodenko. The film is framed as a love story, sort of Syd (Radha Mitchell) is a young wanna-be photo editor who lives with her boyfriend and works on the lowest rung of a pretentious magazine, Frame. Thanks to the wonders of Manhattan plumbing, Syd meets neighbor Lucy (Ally Sheedy), a photography legend who has disappeared from the scene into an alternate heroin universe, aided and abetted by her German ax-actress girlfriend Greta (Patricia Clarkson) and their world-weary pals. Once the plot is set in motion, we can settle back and enjoy the ride, confident it will all come to no good. "I do love melodrama," Cholodenko admits.

The director herself has been undergoing a parallel melodrama off-screen: Rumors have targeted the film as a roman a clef cast from photographer Goldin's own life. Not. true, says the writer-director. "My original inspiration was my friend JoJo Whilden, a photographer I met years ago at San Francisco State, and whose photos I was in," Cholodenko says. "I knew so many photographers then who were making pictures from life--their friends and lovers and parties. It was only later that I became aware of the Boston School [an informal group of hip, edgy, mostly gay photographers] and Nan Goldin." In fact, it's Whilden who actually shot Lucy's photos in the film.

Freely admitting that Goldin was part of her inspiration along with Clarke and the New York lesbian-heroin art scene, Cholodenko thinks the main model for Lucy is more likely the late photographer Diane Arbus. "I was reading her biography at that time," Cholodenko notes. "All the stuff about Lucy's rich Jewish family, her early success and later isolation from the fashion world, that all came from my view of Arbus." As for Goldin, at last report Cholodenko was planning to invite the famed photographer to see High Art for herself.

If the film's a composite, then, might not Syd be a stand-in for Cholodenko herself? She laughs: "Oh, God, maybe so."

Cholodenko not only escaped the Hollywood guilds for the promised land of New York City but managed to descend into the mysterious subculture of lesbian heroin chic and return to tell us the tale. She's clearly grown up a lot since then. Now, with a prestige distributor (October Films), a new ICM agent, and another screenplay in the works, Cholodenko gets to descend into an even stranger subculture--the world of feature financing. Let's hope she survives that one too.