In a crumbling 28-room mansion in East Hampton, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, both named Edie, live surrounded by raccoons, fleas, and stacks of newspapers, cut off from the world except for each other. Albert and David Maysles set up cameras inside Grey Gardens and simply stay, filming the two women as they argue, sing, reminisce, and perform for the lens as though it were the audience they never got. "Big Edie" once sang professionally; "Little Edie" dreamed of dancing in New York and speaks of suitors and missed chances between costume changes made from scarves and swimsuits. The house itself, once genteel, is falling apart, and the Suffolk County health department's threat to condemn it hangs over the film. The women are aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who paid for repairs to keep the county from evicting them, but the film has no interest in that connection beyond the irony. What it shows instead is two people who built an entire world for themselves out of one house and each other.