Lupe (1966)

Director:

Andy Warhol

Writer:

Ronald Tavel (scenario)

Plot:

Based on the life (and death) of actress Lupe Velez, it was the last film Edie Sedgwick made with Andy Warhol (excluding portions of '****') |

Cast

  (Credited cast)

Billy Name
Edie Sedgwick

Runtime:

USA:72 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Edie Sedgwick's Factory Girl Swan Song

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I saw this film a few years ago at the Egyptian in Hollywood. Although it wasn't actually the very last film she would do with Warhol -- she would sadly return to film both "The Andy Warhol Story" and "Ondine & Edie" a year or so later -- "Lupe" is generally noted by Warhol's biographers as he and Edie's last joint effort together in a collection of about 11 films (and the only one, I believe, shot in color). ... Edie is supposed to be Lupe Velez -- the '40s film equivalent of Jennifer Lopez or Salma Hayek -- who committed suicide in 1944 from a lethal overdose of Seconal. With yellow-bleached, bobbed hair and her trademark heavy eyeliner and bat-wing lashes, Edie -- being Edie, of course -- makes no attempt whatsoever to convey the essence of Lupe Velez. This may have been intended by Warhol to be a film about Lupe's lurid past, but it is actually a preview of Edie's tragic demise. Shown on two screens, side by side, we see Edie wake up in a filthy, cluttered room -- becoming increasingly animated, I would venture to guess, as her AM amphetamine dose kicks in. She is joined by Facotry regular Billy Name -- who gives her a trim and chats her up as she applies the first of many layers of make-up. On the opposite screen, we find Edie all made up and dressed in a baby blue, Empire-waist dress or nightgown in a stylishly-appointed apartment (reportedly located in the infamous Dakota -- where "Rosemary's Baby" would later be filmed and John Lennon, of course, would be slain). In this setting, she is clearly out of it: nodding off repeatedly as she has difficulty eating her "last supper" and then later opting to dance with the still full plate of food held aloft in a stuporous kind of barbiturate ballet ... If you know the back-story about Edie at this point in her life, in December of '65, you know the drugs are rapidly overtaking her, the split with Warhol is imminent and her 15 minutes of fame have begun to sputter out. The last shot hits the viewer like a sledgehammer: it is Edie, unconscious, with her head resting gently on the edge of a toilet bowl. Again, nothing like the messy scene described by Kenneth Anger in "Hollywood Babylon" (or even the later degrading scenes littered throughout that mad death rattle of an opus, "Ciao! Manhattan"). Because this is pure Edie, the proverbial angel with a broken wing, showing us in her slow-motion pantomime way that she is indeed doomed -- even if the lights of flash-in-the-pan fame haven't quite yet been extinguished ...