Weekend Rental: Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy

It’s odd that one of the first sequences in (500) Days of Summer (just released yesterday) will haphazardly remind some of the famous When Harry Meet Sally diner sequence and it also happens to contain a Sid & Nancy reference – not the movie, but the maladjusted couple. It acts as a possible foreshadowing of things to come in this rom com and it is one among many references to film history (we find The Graduate, Bergman, French New Wave, Disney and Han Solo). Zooey and Joseph got together with helmer Marc Webb for a piece of viral of self-promotion for 500 Days, which reminds us of a film worth pointing to in our Weekend Rental suggestion. The 1986 film was directed by Alex Cox,lensed by Roger Deakins and featured Gary Oldman in the role of Sid Vicious. See NYTimes review after the jump. 

FEW would have suspected, when Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in 1979 after having been charged with the stabbing death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen several months earlier, that this story had the makings of a big-screen romance. Even now, there are those who wouldn’t quite understand. But Alex Cox, who directed ”Repo Man,” saw the Sid and Nancy story as the occasion for a sordid, intentionally ugly and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful film, a pitch-black comedy about wasted love. At the very least, you have to admire his nerve.

It’s not every film maker who credits special thanks to both Luis Bunuel and Dee Dee Ramone, but then Mr. Cox doesn’t fit any recognizable mold. His decision to film the Sid and Nancy story (which has also been immortalized in at least one play, Denis Spedaliere’s ”Vicious”) is by no means the most idiosyncratic thing he has done. ”Sid and Nancy” has a slow, almost lyrical shot of the title characters as they sit catatonically in bed, high on heroin, until the orangey light flickering across their faces lets the viewer know the room is on fire. There’s another image, also lovely in its own weird way, in which they kiss in an alley while being showered with flying garbage. ”Sid and Nancy” doesn’t try to win its audience’s sympathy in any conventional way, which is just as well, since that would have been a losing battle. But it does succeed in offering bleak, nasty and sometimes hilarious glimpses of life in the punk demimonde.

The film could easily have concentrated on the story of the Sex Pistols, the punk group for which Sid Vicious played bass, and without which neither he nor Nancy Spungen would have achieved such notoriety, but it keeps the band’s story on the sidelines. The lead singer Johnny Rotten (Drew Schofield) is portrayed as an ambitious figure who drops into and out of the film casually, having his head bandaged in one scene and showing himself to be an extremely messy eater in another; the group’s manager, Malcolm McLaren (David Hayman), is the energetic huckster who pronounces Sid ”a fabulous disaster.” The group’s brief story plays itself around Sid and Nancy, who meet when Sid and Johnny throw a brick through the apartment window of Linda, a friend of Nancy’s who works as a dominatrix. Nancy, a groupie, is immediately interested, even though Johnny tells her sex is ugly and Sid tells her it’s boring. Nancy doesn’t really catch Sid’s eye until she offers to find him drugs and slams herself against a brick wall. That, it turns out, is the sort of thing he understands.

It doesn’t take long for Sid and Nancy (played vividly by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb) to settle into their own version of domesticity. Nancy screams all the time (though this makes no discernible dent on Sid). They discuss things like their preferences in dolls, with Sid a G. I. Joe fan and Nancy declaring, ”I’ll never look like Barbie, Barbie doesn’t have bruises!” They have matching dog collars and matching drug habits, and often find themselves in such dire straits that they’ll say or do anything. At one point, Nancy calls her mother with the (fabricated) news that she and Sid have gotten married, using this as a ploy to ask for money. Within moments, the mother has turned down the request, Nancy has berated her at top volume, and the phone booth is a complete shambles.

Like Mr. Oldman’s Sid, who comes through as furious but terminally vague, and Miss Webb’s Nancy, who whines and squawks like a dying chicken, the film has a way of staggering uncertainly from one point to another. What it does best is to generate odd, unexpected images that epitomize the characters’ affectlessness and rage; the glimpse of Nancy lying bleeding while Sid watches cartoons on television is only one of Mr. Cox’s punk epiphanies, and the film’s closing fantasy is indeed haunting. What is weakest, though, is the evocation of the punk ethos. These were doomed characters who lived entirely for the moment, and they can’t easily be resurrected.

And Mr. Cox’s efforts to graft romantic yearnings onto the characters often seem desperately out of place, as when Sid gives a violent rip to Nancy’s black mesh stocking, then begins lovingly to caress her foot. Their tenderness for one another, short-lived as it is, becomes sentimental and even quaint in a film whose every line of dialogue contains one obscenity or another. The film changes its scale a lot too, going from cozy scenes amid the used Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets at Sid and Nancy’s Chelsea Hotel room to broader, wilder moments like the re-enactment of Sid’s performance of ”My Way.” He lip-synchs the song, loses interest somewhere in the middle, and then shoots the rich, respectable know-nothings who make up his imaginary audience.

One more caveat about a film with a lot more cachet than the people who inspired it: ”Sid and Nancy” is difficult to hear. Sid’s Cockney accent is strong, Nancy’s wailing sometimes muddy, and there are times when even subtitles would have been welcome.