This documentary offers an immersion in the lives of residents who keep the building’s spirit as a home for artists alive through a protracted renovation.
Early in “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” a construction worker says that the famed building has “a lot of ghosts.”
A home for untold authors, artists and musicians since it opened in the Gilded Age — and probably the only dwelling anywhere that housed, at different times, Mark Twain and superstars from Andy Warhol’s Factory — the Chelsea Hotel, as seen in this documentary from Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, appears haunted even by its current residents, who wander halls that have been filled with plastic sheeting.
Shot beginning in 2019, while the hotel ground through a contentious and protracted renovation, the film offers an evocative, melancholy immersion in the lives of a handful of holdouts who have maintained the building’s bohemian spirit even as their apartments have been cut up, almost as if they themselves were part of the architecture. The occupant of Janis Joplin’s former suite displays the soap dish he kept from a gutted bathroom. (“She probably didn’t use the soap, from what I know about Janis Joplin,” he says.)
A wire sculptor, a dancer and the head of the tenants’ association (who yearns for construction to finally finish, though other residents disagree) are among the eccentric figures who catch the directors’ eyes. The artist Bettina Grossman, who died in November at 94, says she’s the oldest person in the building and that, unlike her neighbors, she was never offered money to leave.
The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
