Fallen Angel
An elegant apparition in skinny jeans, high heels, and a big black hat, stepping from the shadows of Anthology Film Archives—that was my first impression of the actress and screenwriter Zoë Lund. She was hard but sweet, with a wide smile. Best known for her starring role in Abel Ferara’s Ms. 45 (80) and her script for Ferrara’s Bad Liutenant (92), Lund was many things to those who knew her: a crackerjack storyteller, an idealist, a con artist, a disciplined and inspired worker when her considerable talent wasn’t undermined by the drug she ardently embraced: heroin. She was a gorgeous anachronism—a walking emblem of Sixties radical chic—but also a moralist. Considered by many to be a great beauty, she worked as a possessional model during her twenties. Her work still attracts obsessive fans (see the extensive dossier published on the website Senses of Cinema in Sep/Oct 2002), and in J.J. Martin’s forthcoming documentary The Self-Destruction of Gia, she makes a posthumous appearance, describing life with heroin in rapturous and brutal detail.
We met in 1995 because I’d volunteered to help her catalogue some footage by the late filmmaker Edouard de Laurot, her former boyfriend and one of the original editors of the journal Film Culture. The footage was in terrible shape, but Lund and Lithuanian-born director Julius Ziz crafted a rough cut of a new film from de Laurot’s outtakes, a tribute to his work entitled Chronicle, which she presented in Paris in 1997. That project and others, however—including How I Was Conceived, an expressionistic feature Ziz was directing from a script they co-wrote, in which she was to star with Lou Castel—remain unfinished. When she died in 1999, at age 37, she had many plans, among which the biggest, perhaps, was to end her long romance with junk. “She just touched the surface as an actress, as a writer, as everything,” Ferrara says. “And she really loved life. That kid shoulda lived to 100.”
I vividly remember her crouching and then unfurling her limbs to suggest a ”scorpion woman,” one of the images in de Laurot’s footage. She had also shape-shifted, making her body an emotional lightning rod, in Ms. 45, Ferara’s corrosive vision of a young woman’s transfiguration from waif to executioner. After Lund’s mute seamstress has been raped, she sits on the edge of her tub, stiff with anguish, her knees fused together and her arms stretched out in a long V uncannily like the pose in Edvard Munch’s harrowing painting Puberty. Lund’s preternaturally expressive face, in that near-silent performance, suggested one of the Furies as embodied by Lillian Gish. Although a teenager at the time, she made acting a vehicle for intensely personal symbolism, in particular drawing on her own experience of rape. “It was a beautiful script,” Ferrara says, “but in one way it comes off as a cold film. She gave it a heart and soul.”
Flash back to an August evening in 1978. A determined 16-year-old Zoë leads a gaggle of teenage anarchists in a candlelight procession up Fifth Avenue to the steps of the New York Public Library, where she will read aloud the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti. Her mother, the sculptor Barbara Lekberg, calls it “the kind of terrific pageant Zoë was fond of trying to devise.” Music and radical politics had been Lund’s first loves. Born in New Yolk (as Zoë Tamerlis) in 1962 to bohemian parents (her mother was of Swedish ancestry, her father, Romanian), she won prizes for her musical compositions as a child but in high school spent her free time reading Marx. As a freshman at Mount Holyoke, she wrote, directed, and starred in a musical; she then transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, dropping out after two months to make Ms. 45.
According to Lund, her initial encounter with movies was when a casting director spotted her at an avant-garde concert and invited her to audition for a part in Allan Moyle’s 1980 film Times Square. She went, she claimed, solely “to amuse herself,” bringing along a strip of photo-booth snapshots as her portfolio. Although she didn’t get the part, she was sent to Ferrara, who immediately cast her as Ms. 45‘s frail avenging angel. “The minute I saw this girl, I knew she was the light person,” he says. “When she started talking, forget it.” For her, it was a pivotal moment, one in which she found the more direct creative medium she was seeking.
Around that time, she met the exotic de Laurot at an East Village restaurant. Some 35 years her senior, he claimed to know her idols Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (which may have been true, since figures like Jean Genet appear in his footage). They left for Europe together, resurfacing in the U.S. only after Ms. 45‘s release, then drove around in a van emblazoned with “Ms. 45,” making promotional appearances at which she’d spin her own political take on the plot.
De Laurot encouraged Lund to write, collaborating with her on a massive novel called Curfew U.S.A., which they turned into a film script. An obsessive personality who cultivated an air of intrigue, de Laurot said he traveled incognito because of his involvement with underground political organizations. Jonas Mekas recalls, “De Laurot was a 100 percent political person. And also very much influenced by Sartre and the existentialists, so in all his writings, his scripts, there is always the idea of being engaged with reality.” Filmmaker Larry Cohen, who cast her in Special Effects (84), remembers: “Zoë was with an older man who looked like Vincent Price from House of Wax—he wore a cape and a big slouch hat, and he’d come around and wait for her. He seemed like the kind of guy who might have had a bomb under his cape in 1917.”
Lund left de Laurot in 1985, but writing was for keeps. During the late Eighties and early Nineties, she worked on a spate of scripts, most notably Bad Lieutenant but also for several other projects with personal significance. Her favorite original screenplay, Free Will and Testament, a political thriller involving a female Latin American dictator that reworked themes from Curfew U.S.A., was presented at New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1994. In another, Kingdom for a Horse, a junkie egghead gets caught between alternate worlds when he finds he has changed the political reality of the present by copping laudanum in a dream set in the past. Other projects included drafts of the screenplays for Julian Schnabel’s Reinaldo Arenas biopic, Before Night Falls (00), Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (98), a film about porn star John Holmes commissioned by Christopher Walken, and a script for J.J. Martin on the heroin-addicted model Gia, who died of AIDS in 1986 (a dramatic feature project he started before turning to the documentary), which was set aside when HBO began a movie on the same subject.
De Laurot’s films, which documented such dramatic events as the Chicago “Days of Rage” in 1969 and a wake held after the Weather Underground accidentally blew up a West Village townhouse in 1970 (mourners held candles and sticks of dynamite), had fired Lund’s imagination. Fueled by his vivid political and religious imagery, from prairie fires to crucifixions, her writing displayed a fast-moving narrative style, a meticulous sense of detail, and a knack for hard-boiled dialogue. In the first part of her intricately plotted novel 490, a projected trilogy, the chapter titles all reference cinema. The story pivots around de Laurot’s footage; eventually, in an apparent nod to kindred spirit Alexander Medvedkin, it is projected onto the side of a van that makes stops near corn and wheat fields in the Midwest.
She valued writing more than acting but nevertheless brought an incandescent enthusiasm to her performances. “You must make things entertaining and have a joy about your work,” she said. She complained about shooting Temístocles López’s Exquisite Corpses (89) but relished doing a garish seminude cabaret number for which she’d written the lyrics. In Cohen’s whip-smart satire Special Effects—a sleazier, more Pop Vertigo—she was all coltish energy, playing a double role as a pinup model who comes to a bad end and a clever rich girl coaxed into impersonating her.
“Zoë played the two roles differently in a believable way,” Cohen says. “She had a wonderful face, a terrific personality, she really could act, and she exuded intelligence. I’m amazed that no one ever gave her a part in a mainstream movie.” Ferrara says, however, “There was a time when she was set up with a William Morris agent and everything was there for her. If she’d really wanted it, she coulda gotten it. She had a lifestyle that was about her writing. She wasn’t gonna be sitting around doing her nails and waiting for a TV agent to call. But whenever the situation arose for her to be in front of the camera, she owned that medium.”
In the sulfurous morality play Bad Lieutenant, she made two mesmerizing appearances as a wraithlike junkie, the second of which ushers in the spiritual crisis that leads the lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) to sacrifice himself for a pair of teen rapists. Her character (“Magdalene” in the original script) shoots him up, then makes her so-called vampire speech, invoking Christ’s instructions to forgive “seventy times seven,” her words and the trance she induces conjuring images of the Passion and a suppliant nun. Written minutes before the scene was shot, the speech encapsulates Lund’s preoccupation with sin and redemption while evoking the voluptuous pain of smack addiction. One obsession she incorporated into Ferrara’s original outline was Andre Gide’s concept of the “gratuitous act,” asserting of Keitel’s degraded cop, “He commits an absurd act of martyrdom, an acte gratuit, dying for our sins.” Her only directorial effort was a minute-and-a-half short, Hot Ticket, made for the 1993 Rotterdam Film Festival. The action consists of Lund exchanging a syringe for a movie ticket at a box-office window, then leaving rather than entering the theater. Outside, she dons one of her trademark floppy black hats, peers around, and says, “That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is.” The film is a poignant artifact, both for the yearning for revolutionary possibility it expresses and for her compelling presence.
A longtime denizen of New York’s Lower East Side, Lund was at home among the flora and fauna of its underground community. At one point, the punk musician and poet Richard Hell approached her about playing Theresa Stern, the alter ego he long ago created with former bandmate Tom Verlaine, in a feature film. (Hell eventually shot a short starring Kate Valk entitled Meet Theresa Stern.) Her daily life was as colorful as her work: for a while, she and husband Robert Lund, whom she married in 1986, shared their home with hundreds of pet rats. Mekas says the rodent-filled apartment was “like a puppet theater.” And Ferrara cackles, “I’d bring people over, and I’d say, ‘She has these gerbils,’ but she’d go, ‘They’re rats!'”
For many years heroin was central to her life and work. Hell wrote in an obituary, “I’ve known a lot of serious drug users, but Zoë was Queen. She didn’t just love heroin, she believed in it.” In The Self-Destruction of Gia, that faith seems shaken at last, as she almost scientifically recounts the drug’s intense pleasures and acute miseries. Suggesting why she felt it nourished her art, she describes how it allowed her “to think of many things at once” and afforded “the opportunity for everything to be a little bit different, a little bit enhanced.” But also, “When the junkie is in need, the pain of life is felt.” She certainly endured that pain.
Redemption often beckons from great distances, and in 1997 Lund moved to Paris for a fresh start. She began working on The Book of Bags, a portrait of a fading era on the Lower East Side comprised of photographs of glassine heroin bags juxtaposed with pungent vignettes and stories. She was also acting in Ziz’s How I Was Conceived, a project that came to a halt with her sudden death in April 1999. One thing that remains is a pilot for the film created for a market screening at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. At the end of this promo, she tumbles off a bicycle, then lies on the ground laughing, her beautiful mouth looking big enough to devour everything around her. It’s an image that haunts me because it captures some of the things that made her irreplaceable—her charm, her recklessness, and the fierce joy with which she lived.
