‘New York isn’t a city for nostalgia,” Susan Seidelman says to me, matter-of-factly, as we chat over lunch in the lobby bar of Manhattan’s Ace hotel. “It’s not a city, like Paris or Rome, that rests on a glorified past. It’s a city that has no pity. It doesn’t stop for anyone or anything. It just keeps evolving.”
Seidelman, a film director best known for her hit 1985 comedy Desperately Seeking Susan, which helped cement Madonna’s stardom, is right. Newness is what New York is built on; it’s a city that, of course, never stands still. But, in recent years, as rents relentlessly rise and its residents homogenise, New York is also a city beset by a romanticised yearning. Indeed, this is largely why I’m interviewing Seidelman: later this year, two of her early movies, Smithereens and Desperately Seeing Susan, are playing at the Barbican centre in London as part of a season called the Grime and the Glamour: NYC 1976-90, featuring films “about the wild days and nights of New York’s coolest era”.
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