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Ally Sheedy Interview
I'm having trouble concentrating. Ally Sheedy is sitting inches away and all I can think about is giving her a makeover. Not that she doesn't look good -- she looks fine, if a little tired. But being this close to Sheedy, I can't help but notice her pores and the outline of her lips. And I can't stop thinking about that transformative scene in "The Breakfast Club" when Claire (Molly Ringwald), the misunderstood, rich-bitch princess, takes her makeup bag to Sheedy's sullied, mascara-smeared face and the two bond over blush. With the stroke of an eye pencil, Sheedy's character, Allison, went from being a disheveled, dandruff-laden freak into a shiny, happy, headbanded girl. Today, traces of the premakeover Allison mark Sheedy's face. She looks cloudy and brooding, her dark eyes mysterious, her copper-inflected brown hair a little matted and mussed. She reaches for a pack of American Spirits, and even though I haven't smoked in months, I ask her for one, as a sort of bonding thing -- like she and Molly and the makeup bag. I am sitting across from the woman whose movies I watched dozens of times as a teenager, a woman whose characters I incorporated into my own emerging personality. In my high school, as I imagine in most, there were the Claires, who, like Ringwald's character, knew how to eat sushi and wore real diamond studs -- and there were the Allisons, those who wore body-camouflaging clothing and made daring, obscene gestures, as when Sheedy giddily shook her dandruff flakes into a pile, just to fuck with people. I've always suspected that even the Claires of the world identified more with Sheedy's character than with Ringwald's. Allison Reynolds was the living, breathing embodiment of high school ennui and dislocation. She looked like what we all felt like -- weird, awkward and alone. Ally Sheedy leans over and lights my cigarette, then slouches back in her chair, arms folded. For a second it feels like high school, two girls unraveling their lives over a cigarette. "I just feel like with guys, the woman is the accessory," she says about her past roles in more mainstream films -- though there's the sense that she's also talking about roles she's played in a few real-life relationships. "Almost always it is her role to compliment the man's prowess, his masculinity, his strength. Even the position you have to take -- you're lying down and he's on top," she says. "He's got oil on his muscles, you're moving around moaning, 'Oh God, this is wonderful!' Actually, it's kind of horrific." Sheedy speaks in italics. Words consisting of more than one syllable are emphasized with a guttural twist or garnished with an eye roll. Sheedy's words are e-nun-ci-at-ed. They languish in her mouth, then get rolled up and savored like fine food before it is swallowed. Her gaze is intense, and at times her mouth seems close to settling into a sneer. Her lithe, serpentine body is contorted so it can fit into a hotel armchair. She sits limb over limb, her bare feet exposing toenails painted a deep, dramatic purple. Taking a drag on her cigarette, she leans back with a daring look that says, "Ask me anything." It's not as if Sheedy has that much to hide. She has willingly laid her struggles out on a platter for the media to feast on. Yes, she had an abortion when she was 16. Yes, she's struggled with bulimia. Yes, her mother is a lesbian. And yes, she was addicted to the tranquilizer Halcion and did a stint in rehab. Rattling off these facts like they are items from some sort of emotional résumé, Sheedy remarkably doesn't sound cavalier, just honest. It's as if Allison walked off the set of "The Breakfast Club" and surfaced a decade later and said, "Yeah, so I had a fucked-up adolescence and my 20s were a nightmare. But hey, here I am." The battles have been waged and Sheedy is just patiently recounting the details for the history books. Twelve years after "The Breakfast Club" catapulted Sheedy to stardom, she is reemerging in the form of another marginal, complex character -- Lucy Berliner, a heroin-addicted lesbian in Lisa Cholodenko's luminous debut feature, "High Art." After making a splash in the New York art world with gritty, Nan Goldinesque photographs, Lucy bails out and leaves the scene entirely, unable to deal with the pressure of fame. "I loved the attention," Lucy says of her fame. "But I couldn't deal with the impact." |
