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| February 27, 1997 Is this the coolest girl in the world? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chloe Sevigny, star of Kids, is the It Girl, JONATHAN ROMNEY reports. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C HLOE SEVIGNY is the It Girl. We know that because no less an authority than novelist Jay McInerney told us so, in a New Yorker piece that dutifully followed her from rave to clothes store to fashion shoot. That was even before she'd made her first film, Larry Clark's scuzz-generation saga Kids. Time Out magazine has invoked her fondness for London as further evidence that the capital is the place for international It Girls and Boys to be seen, and this month she's in The Face, posing in tawdry disco-doll clobber and what looks like a prominent love bite. "I hate the whole It Girl thing," she says, rolling her eyes like a seasoned media operator. "Now I feel all this pressure --- like, every time I leave the house, I have to be stylish." But if you believe the mystique woven around her by the street style mavens, Sevigny is cool for being uncool, style because she's anti-style. All this is a little mystifying when you meet her --- at 22, although she could pass for 16, she's personable, quiet, rather undemonstrative in appearance. Her taste for thrift-shop cast-offs looks more like perverse guesswork than counter-couture chic, and the smeary make-up suggests she's only just had her first stab at Mom's kohl. The only obviously remarkable thing is her hooting laugh, which breaks out almost at random, like a Hoover imploding. Famous for being famous? Until now, Sevigny was dangerously close to it. In Kids, you couldn't quite tell whether she was really acting, or just being herself for Clark's voyeuristic eye. Things become clearer with her second film, Trees Lounge. In this picture of small-town life through a bourbon glass, Sevigny plays a rebellious 17-year-old who gets entangled with the amiable lush played by the film's director, indie icon Steve Buscemi. After the lettuce-limp Jennie in Kids, she turns out to be a tough, abrasive presence. "I was waiting forever for Trees Lounge to come out, 'cos I wanted people to see me doing something different than crying. In Kids, I didn't even have a thing to say. It was all in the face and the eyes. Trees Lounge was scary, 'cos I was working with all these professional New York character actors --- I thought there'd be a pressure to keep up with them." But Buscemi, directing his first feature, was under too much pressure himself to worry about pushing her. "He wasn't giving me that much direction. He sort of said: 'It's too late for me to back out, this is totally insane, I have so much to do! Just do what you think is right, and if it's not working I'll tell you.'" In Kids, Clark's sleight of hand convinced you that you were seeing raw verite. To an extent, says Sevigny, you were. "I was just hanging out with my friends, reading lines, and there happened to be a camera there." She got into the film through her friend Harmony Korine, a film-obsessed boy she hung out with in Washington Square Park. Korine scripted Kids, and appeared in it --- he's the gabbling nerd in pebble glasses in the nightclub scene --- and it was only later that he also became her boyfriend. "All the events in Kids," she says, "were based on events that Harmony had seen, and everyone was playing a character based on themselves. It was accurate --- going out to raves every night, and the next day straight to the park and drinking all day." The sex and drugs that made Kids such a moral hot potato were also true to life, she says, although she never knew any boys as predatory as Telly the "virgin surgeon". She once considered trying heroin, but it was actually seeing the graphic shooting-up in Clark's photo album Tulsa that changed her mind. Sevigny comes from a small "blue-blood town", Darien, Connecticut --- "I despised it. I wasn't friendly with anyone in school. When I was a little girl, all the girls were asking, 'My daddy drives a BMW, what does your daddy drive?'" Her parents, she says, were "pretty liberal". Her father --- an accountant who later became a painter --- would take her into New York on his commuting trips. "That was my favourite thing, to get dressed up for tea at the Helmsley Palace." Once into her teens, she made her own trips into Manhattan for the weekend, and joined the skateboard crowd. She was spotted by the teen-wannabe bible Sassy magazine for a fashion shoot, then landed a work placement with them as fashion assistant. She did costumes for, and appeared in, Sonic Youth and Lemonheads videos, and worked in a clothes shop called Liquid Sky, where her job, it seems, partly entailed just being visible as the face of the moment. Fashion remains her enduring obsession. "I say to my agent: 'I'm not acting right now, why don't we find some light work doing costumes?' But they say: 'No one will take you seriously as an actress.' Why not?'" she croaks, for the first time taking on an edge of movie-brat pique. She comes across as equally serious about films. "I only work once a year 'cos I'm not doing the commercial Hollywood pictures. I'd rather build up a good body of work --- personal, independent films." Somehow it's hard to see her moving into respectable ingenue roles � la Winona Ryder, balancing porcelain teacups ("I could do that! My mother read to me from a book of etiquette!"). Hardly a multiplex kid, she says her favourite film-makers are Fassbinder, Leos Carax and Alan Clarke, the British director of The Firm and Rita, Sue And Bob Too: "His Steadicam is just so natural!" Time Out suggested that she and Korine would be the new John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. "Maybe the new Fassbinder and Hanna Schuygulla!" she hoots. She's recently been working with Korine on his own first film as director, Gummo --- another teen chronicle shot in the poorest parts of Nashville. Sevigny is playing a lead role, doing the costumes and, apparently, breathing down Korine's neck as he writes. "In Kids, his female roles are really weak. Now you'll see how strong they are, they're the focal point of the film --- that's my influence." While shooting Gummo, dragged up in heavy metal gear, she refused to come out of character to promote Trees Lounge at the Toronto Film Festival. She has a reputation for being wayward: she once declined to turn up for a photo session for Madonna's photographer of choice, Steven Meisel. The celebrity game being what it is, such things have only added to her mystique. "Fuck 'em," she says, "if they want me, they're gonna hire me anyway. If it doesn't work out, I'll go into costumes." Trees Lounge suggests it will work out. Of course, in the long term, being a working actress might not be as glamorous as It Girl status, but then there's only so long you can be the New Thing in Town. We may yet see her balancing teacups with the best of them. |
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| the "it girl" |