Nico Icon

Review by Edward Guthmann in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Pictured left: Nico with son Ari

Judging by the patchwork of impressions she left among the people who knew her, it's obvious that Nico, the fabled chanteuse of the Velvet Underground, was one slippery diva. "She was a dark, mummyish figure, but very erotic," one friend remembers. "She was refined, delicate," her aunt insists. "She was the queen of the bad girls," another chuckles.

In her remarkable documentary, NICO-ICON, German film maker Susanne Ofteringer explores all the facets of the woman who was born Christa Paffgen in 1938 in Cologne, Germany, and carved a self-destructive path through the snake pits of high fashion, underground film and rock and roll. It ended with her death in 1988 of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by a bicycle accident on the Spanish island of Ibiza.

Spooky, mercurial and obsessed with her own mortality, Nico started modeling at 16, studied acting at the Strasberg Institute, appeared in Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA and Warhol's CHELSEA GIRLS, and grew to loathe the cool beauty that was her calling card. Determined to prove herself as an artist, she joined the VELVET UNDERGROUND, a group that inspired a generation of alienated punk rockers a decade later. In many ways, Nico was the ultimate '60's icon (hence the title): heroin addict, doomed rock star, Warhol superstar. She was also the lover/muse to spectacular men: musicians Jim Morrison, Jackson Browne and Lou Reed, and French film star Alain Delon, who fathered her son, Ari, but refused to acknowledge him.

All of those facets are examined in NICO-ICON, a scrupulous, toughminded film that sympathizes with Nico, but never idealizes her or offers facile sentiment. Ofteringer interviews Delon's mother, who raised Nico's son, but doesn't turn the old woman into an object of pity. When Ofteringer reveals that Nico introduced her son to heroin, she stops short of editorializing. Ofteringer sculptures, jumbles, and kaleidoscopes her images--mixing them with Nico's music and sampling of TV commercials and old interviews. One moment, Nico's playing herself in LA DOLCE VITA. The next, she's hawking perfume and swimwear in print ads. Keep flipping the celluloid pages and Nico is gracing the cover of Vogue, debuting with the Velvet Underground at the American Psychiatric Convention, and cavorting with Morrison, her "soul brother."

Nico doesn't emerge as a fully rounded woman, but a glamorous blank--ultimately unknowable. NICO-ICON is more than the investigation of a doomed celebrity: It's also the mirror reflecting her friends, her audience and pop culture.