Nico Icon Nico Icon While watching Susanne Ofteringer's "Nico Icon", I kept asking myself, "Why the hell did she make a documentary about THIS thumping bore of a mannequin whose chief virtue was looking good in designer originals and whose toneless singing voice appealed mainly to audiences who must have been as strung out on heroin as she was?" If you're going to make a movie about a junkie, why not an interesting and outrageous one like Marianne Faithfull who could and can act and sing rings around Nico and is still alive? Hmm... Maybe that's it. Maybe the fact that Nico died after falling off a bicycle in the South of France made the storyline simpler: Beautiful, selfish model sleeps with famous men (Alain Delon, Jim Morrison, Jackson Browne) & goes to hell, but not before she's shared her legacy with her son by turning him on to heroin..
Four of the voices in Jean Stein's biography of Edie Sedgwick are also in Nico Icon: Danny Fields, Paul Morrissey, Billy Name and Viva. Does that mean that we can expect more unriveting movies about all the other non-luminaries in Andy Warhol's Factory? Hope not. At least this study of a woman who loved no one and vice-versa is short. And the archival footage may be of some interest if you happen to be a sixties clipaholic.
Copyright 1995 Monica Sullivan