Jonathan Romney
I Shot Andy Warhol was the opening film in the Un Certain Regard section. This makes perfect sense as its subject, Valerie Solanas, had a certain way of seeing the world, to say the very least, and the same is true of debut director Mary Harron.
Solanas was the radical lesbian writer who took a gun to Warhol after being mocked and, finally, excommunicated from Warhol’s Factory. Harron’s film takes the classic investigative route, as police and psychologists piece together what happened, but the clinical angle on Solanas remains tellingly and frustratingly elusive.
Solanas is out of time and place, a 1950s beat radical with commitment in a Manhattan where everyone’s committed just to being there. Lili Taylor is perfect in the lead: nervy and often very funny, she plays Solanas as a charismatic natural hustler with a furious heart.
As for Warhol, Jared Harris’s (right) drolly diffident performance is that crucial bit more authoritative than mere impersonation.
There’s a degree of distracting name-spotting and dropping, with all the Factory in-names — superstars and also-rans alike — being present and correct but this is a witty, visually adventurous trip into Solanas’s head, which is a passably strange place to be.
The film is on at the international film festival in Johannesburg, September 23 and in Cape Town, September 25 and 26. See programmes for date and times