FILM REVIEW: DREAMING WALLS (2022) DIR. AMÉLIE VAN ELMBT & MAYA DUVERDIER
Theatrical one-sheet for DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL, a Magnolia Pictures release.
Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Written by Belle McIntyre
This homage to the legendary Chelsea Hotel opens fittingly with a montage of ghostly images projected over the time worn walls. They are some of the denizens and celebrities who spent time and often created important work within these very walls. The list is long and impressive including such luminaries as Larry Rivers, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thompson, Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgewick, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon. This sets the tone and the mood for a more immersive experience which re-directs our attention back to the brick and mortar of the building itself which achieved mythic status as a revered relic which enabled, nurtured/ tolerated artistic freedom, hedonism, and licentious behavior embodied by the fabulous and notorious ferociously creative artists.
What the film dwells on is the now of the Chelsea Hotel as seen through the eyes of the current long term tenants who have endured through the wild and crazy times, the selling and endless renovation over the last 10 years as the new owner takes on the monumental task of reinvention while respecting the rent stabilized older lifelong residents and simultaneously upgrading the available apartments to the level of an upscale boutique hotel and still retaining enough of the seedy charm and creative funkiness of the original without deracinating the deeply embedded layers of its cultural history.
A scene from DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL, a Magnolia Pictures release. ©Clindoeilfilms. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The current tenants are a charmingly eccentric mix of mostly elderly artists from various disciplines who guide us through their Chelsea memories as seen from the Chelsea in transition. There is a touching détente between the tenants and the workmen who have become a fact of life. One of the construction workers expresses his sense of the ghostly presences which he feels in the walls and his respect for them. The camera follows these “guides” down the hallways and behind the plastic construction curtains and into some of the apartments of the current tenants who all have their own stories to impart. It is an unexpected look at this iconic landmark in that it feels very personal and intimate. It is a tone poem and quite a lovely one.
A scene from DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL, a Magnolia Pictures release. ©Clindoeilfilms. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
