WELCOME TO NEW YORK (Abel Ferrara 2014)

Abel Ferrara: Welcome to New York (2014)

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GERARD DEPARDIEU IN WELCOME TO NEW YORK

A vivid whiff of scandal with layers of involvement

The protagonist of Welcome to New York is called "Mr. Devereaux." But the important Frenchman and his very rich wife (Gérard Depardieu, Jacqueline Bisset) clearly represent Dominique Stauss-Kahn and his spouse of 20 years, Anne Sinclair. Or a version of them attuned to the circumstances of this film. Abel Ferrara, the director, is a specialist in moral meltdowns and disasters. The Stauss-Kahn scandal was too good to resist. This version of events may not be enlightening in its depiction of those events. But it rubs our noses in them; it makes them real. It's a disturbingly vivid reenactment of a man using wealth and power to indulge in unbridled sexual debauchery, his subsequent humiliation when exposed for it, and his continuing defiance. And these are events and stands to which Ferrara and Depardieu themselves have an uncomfortably but usefully incestuous relationship, which the film also explores.

Depardieu, very much a subject of scandal himself and a once great actor with a declining career, gives a jaw-dropping and perhaps career-restoring performance, both bold and selfless. Entering the scene later in the film's action, when she comes to help, if not save, him, and a fancy town house is being arranged for Devereaux's house arrest, Bisset is the picture of indignation, anger and love. Their extended scene together, which feels improvised in Cassavetes style (as does Depardieu's performance throughout), is the only one where Devereaux's lifestyle is debated. Ferrara, working in his native New York again, is responsible for vérité in the filmmaking.

The actual events depicted here and the resulting press frenzy were of course an enormous scandal in France with wide international repercussions. DSK, as he is known, was a major French public figure in May 2011 when he was detained at JFK airport, arrested, and brought back to New York jail on sexual assault charges due to testimony by a hotel maid. His arrest spelled doom for the man's important career. He was head of the International Monetary Fund and moreover, a very good one who had restored the IMF's reputation and importance. He was considered a likely candidate for the 2012 election of President of France to replace Nicolas Sarkozy (a fact very briefly mentioned in the film). He was also an author and lecturer.

Not all of that comes through in the film. Ferrara and Depardieu fail to depict DSK's distinction, his intellectual weight, or the outrage in France to his treatment, the "perp walk" by the NYPD that was deemed a needless provocation, even part of a conspiracy. It's only clear that Devereaux is a rich and powerful man, and one given to leading a life of continual debauchery, with expensive call girls sent in to cleanse his palate after the first set of expensive call girls. He also talks dirty with his daughter (Marie Mouté) and her North American fiancee. And then when a black, foreign employee of hotel housekeeping (Pamela Afesi, representing actual DSK accuser Nafissatou Diallo) wanders into his suite, he forces himself upon her too. Then he heads to the airport, forgetting his Blackberry.

Ferrara does all this with loving and lurid precision, and he captures the blow-by-blow events when Devereaux is taken back with exceptional realism. Depardieu himself is admittedly a man given to physical (if not sexual) self-indulgence, physically evident in his enormous girth. And he does the sexual part very well, and the humiliation without reserve. He strips for the cops, and more than once is seen naked in all his obesity and from every angel. It's a performance that literally bares all, but there is no humility. Devereau-DSK-Depardieu takes it all quietly, but he denies all and at the same time acknowledges all and refuses to repent or to change.

Ferrara recently made Pasolini, a film about the writer-poet-director that focused on his sad and sordid death. Pasolini's last hours and that crime were shown with remarkable realism; but the earlier sequences of Pasolini's interviews and intellectual declarations are far less convincing, while the use of an American actor, Willem Dafoe, speaking English, as Pasolini amid Italian actors speaking Italian is just odd. No effort has been made to show the complex, executive, or thinking side of Devereaux-DSK. So that problem in the Pasolini film doesn't come up; it's just a blank. But the sometimes inexplicable switches back and forth between French and English among French people in Welcome's dialogues carry a suggestion of Pasolini's linguistic oddities.

Ferrara seems better at the mechanical than the moral side of his story here. The moral dimension is present only in the wife's bitter reproaches. She accuses Devereaux of derailing her own ambitions as well as his own. She knew this was going on and suspected this would happen. (Many turn out to have known also about DSK's behavior and not done anything.) Devereaux himself admits he's a sex addict. And he doesn't care.

Since this is not a troubled or repentant man, one misses the inner turmoil that made Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and Harvey Keitel's performance so compelling. One is only compelled by the unique physicality, not only of Depardieu, but of the locations. The cops and cells are as accurate-feeling as the posh offices and hotel rooms; indeed according to Scott Foundas' Variety review Ferrara used "some of the real law-enforcement officials from the DSK case to reprise their roles onscreen." Even the luxury town house Simone, Devereaux's wife, rents at $60,000 a month for his several months of house arrest is right. In fact it's the literal house on Franklin Street that Anne Sinclair rented for herself and Strauss-Kahn. Not being an easy place to sell, it was available. In the end, through all this physical precision, we may learn more about New York real estate and the NYPD than about sex addiction.

But there is an aura here. Ferrara has a drug background. Depardieu has a history of fiscal exile, scandal, and drunken alcoholic behavior. And se we may meditate on all that. The film opens with an excerpted interview with Depardieu in which he says, in effect, "I don't like playing roles and I'm not playing one here: I am this character." In his realistic physical setting of the Staruss-Kahn scandal, maybe Ferrara has in some sense simply established a plausible and timely framework in which Depardieu (the name looks a bit like "Devereaux") can play himself.

Despite a hands-off policy and no theatrical release, some French writers have discussed the film. Isabelle Regnier in Le Monde, writing at the time of Cannes 2014, had some favorable things to say, but pointed out the arguably "antisemitic" references to Simone, Devereux's wife. DSK's lawyer has mentioned those too, and Strauss-Kahn was going to bring a libel suit against the film. But his recent involvement in trials about a prostitution ring in Marseille may get in the way of that, and he and Anne Sinclair are no longer married.

Welcome to New York, 125 mins., debuted on the internet in various European countries in May 2014, and also 17 May at Cannes, not as a selection and not finding a theatrical distributor, only VOD, hence avoided by French critics. On AlloCiné, with no press rating, the spectator response has been negative (rating 1.6). Combined NYC theatrical and US VOD release by IFC Films Sundance Selects scheduled for 27 March 2015. Screened online courtesy of IFC Films Sundance Selects for this review 16 March 2015. It has lately (28 March) picked up some good reviews and now has a Matacritic rating of 65%.