One of the most significant American documentary films which has inspired filmmakers, theater directors, and fashion designers for more than forty years.
Two American aristocrats, the aunt and cousin of US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, live in the once magnificent—now littered with debris and inhabited by raccoons—mansion "Gray Gardens" at the famous resort of East Hampton.
The elder, Edith Bouvier Beale, hardly gets out of bed; she sings all day long to old songs from musicals, surrounded by flies, newspapers, photographs, and portable tiles, on which she cooks corn under the supervision of her own portrait painted in the time of distant youth.
Younger Edith (or, as she's called, Little Edie) put her life on hold caring for her mother, and now she devises incredible outfits, remaking old clothes and complementing each image with a permanent turban. Little Edie clumsily flirts with rare outsiders, accuses her mother of causing her unfulfilled personal life, and periodically rushes to leave for New York—to perform on Broadway. Once she even dances in the frame, but, hardly hearing the sonorous voice of her mother, she again runs to give her a blanket. That’s how directors Albert and David Mayzels saw this eccentric couple in the summer of 1975. However, the action of the picture could well occur today, because the time inside the "Gray Gardens" lives by its own laws. It just stopped.
Directors Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer. USA, 1975, 94 min
16+
