It probably wasn’t real and frankly, it wasn’t all that steamy! The rumor that Hayden Christensen and Sienna Miller actually had sex during a love scene between their characters, a Bob Dylanesque musician and Edie Sedgwick is eating up all the films publicity allotment.
Despite denials by the filmmakers and by Miller, national entertainment outlets are reporting it as a possible nudge nudge.
The media is jumping on a perfectly planned publicity campaign-go-round if you ask me. The kind of thing Warhol and his superstars might have dreamed up forty years ago – an old-fashioned publicity stunt.
That kind of titillation won Andy Warhol and his crew, including Edie, fame and fortune. They shot sex films that Warhol directed, featuring some mighty kinky stuff. Warhol’s people lusted after superstardom, and his films made them famous.
Factory Girl is Edie Sedgwick’s story, or someone’s version of it - it’s a sad one. She died young and beautiful of a drug overdose. People who do that often become icons; it was that other icon James Dean who said ‘Die young and leave a good looking corpse’. She has been the subject of books and essays, now it’s Edie’s turn to have a movie.
Unfortunately, her story is often told - good girl goes bad. She was a good person who made bad decisions because she had sunk into a bad life. It ended badly because her father was bad.
Sedgwick’s family descended from the Mayflower and enjoyed an upper class life of wealth and privilege. That was the life Edie was desperate to escape.
She dropped out of school and ran off to New York and into the web of Warhol, the pop artist and master manipulator.
Edie was extraordinarily beautiful and tender hearted - a perfect mark for Warhol and his crowd. She was seduced and made part of the Factory - the silver foil lined rooms where Warhol painted, held court and made movies.
Miller is committed to the part, down to the clipped private school diction and self-conscious wildness of a girl who spent time in a sanitarium and adopted that persona. She is as convincing as Edie in her youthful hopeful days as she is in the drug addled hopeless ones.
Guy Pearce plays Warhol, the latest in a long line of actors including David Bowie and Jared Harris, to take on that difficult and iconic role.
Pearce has done a good job; his Andy is so blank, so amoral and uncaring so superficial yet fascinating. Like Edie, we are sucked in against our better judgement, fooled and charmed by the fake innocence Warhol exuded in archival footage.
Turns out, Pearce as Warhol is the one we are watching.
No one, especially the sad, delusional beauty Edie, had the guts to question Warhol’s emotional abuse. The film is more interesting when Andy, the wig and corset-wearing mama’s boy, is onscreen, but Miller gives her role a good shot.
Not the greatest film, but not the worst either.
Factory Girl
Opens UK March 16. MPAA: PG- 13
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