Oh the sweet nostalgia of the 90s! The toxic world of commercial photography, particularly if you’re a woman, and the chic of heroin-fuelled nights.

I’m sure I saw this film at the time, I was in the photography world and would’ve been intrigued by the casting of Radha Mitchell and Patricia Clarkson and especially Ally Sheedy. I don’t have strong memories of it, although watching this restored version felt like seeing something familiar.

 The first feature by Lisa Cholodenko (who went on to direct The Kids Are All Right (2010)), it casts Sheedy against her teen angst type as Lucy Berliner, a reclusive Nan Goldin-like photographer, ensconced in a New York loft with her perpetually stoned girlfriend, Greta (Patricia Clarkson). Greta was in a Fassbinder film and trades on it often, oblivious to her faded glory. Lucy is scrawny and spiky and forever forgiving of Grace’s childishness and petulance.

Aspiring photography magazine editor Syd (Mitchell) lives below and knocks on their door one day when there is a leak in her bathroom. She is keen to make her mark at Frame magazine – although she has been promoted to assistant editor, this seems to mean fetching coffee and snacks for her odious and misogynistic bosses.

Syd has a wide-eyed innocence like Bambi and when she visits Lucy‘s apartment, all of her friends know it as they try and hide their drugt aking, at least for the first few times. She of course recognises the quality of Lucy‘s photography, which is up all over her apartment, and seizes the potential for this elevating her career.

You can see that Lucy, after a decade in a drug haze, is attracted to the praise and the adulation from the young very gorgeous Syd. Cholodenko lets their friendship develop naturally, you can see that the fascination and attraction is there but it is complicated by the chasm between them in terms of life experience and sense of hope and purpose. There is nothing terribly sexy or sensual about the relationship that develops, but it feels real in its awkwardness and the scenes where the pivotal photos are taken have real beauty.

We can see that this is not just about love or attraction, but also about what we bring to another person when a relationship starts, a glimpse into a different kind of person you can be.

As it’s happening, you’ll see where the story is heading and there is something about the ending that feels just a little bit too contrived. It feels like the slightly heavy-handed moralising that would be expected in the 90s about drug use, and maybe also a tendency to not show gay people as able to have long and happy lives. It underplays it though, not allowing the melodrama or the emotion to overtake the sparseness of the scenes.