‘Welcome to New York’ erotic but engaging
There’s no point in mincing words. Director Abel Ferrara’s “Welcome to New York” is an invitation to spend two hours with a repulsive character. It is also a compelling movie because of the fearless performance of Gerard Depardieu at its very dark and decadent heart.
Mr. Depardieu plays Devereaux, a corpulent, but charismatic French libertine based loosely on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund and one of the most powerful politicians in France. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it should.
In 2011, Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who was often referred to in the American media by his initials “DSK,” was accused by a hotel maid in New York of sexually assaulting her. The NYPD pulled him from a flight that would have spirited him back to France minutes before it taxied from the departure gate.
From the moment he was frog-marched through a scrum of paparazzi tipped off about his arrest, DSK became a fixture of New York’s rabid tabloid media. His vast wealth and political influence didn’t insulate him from the indignities of the American criminal justice system, a presumption of guilt that scandalized and angered the French.
While awaiting trial, DSK lived under house arrest in a luxury New York apartment as reporters and television crews stood vigil outside. The spectacle grew as the trial date approached only to be short-circuited by the district attorney’s decision not to proceed because its office had lost confidence in DSK’s accuser’s story and its ability to prove a rape occurred.
Free to return to Paris, DSK insisted that any sexual encounter between him and the maid had been consensual, and that the disparities in wealth and power between them had made him a target of financial opportunity.
This is the nonfiction background for director Ferrara’s fictional take on the DSK affair. In a script he cowrote with Chris Zois, the director takes plenty of liberties with the outline of the scandal to create a space for the larger than life Mr. Depardieu to comfortably inhabit.
“Welcome to New York” is a film that refuses to look away from the sweaty and intensely graphic nature of sex. Whether it lingers a little too long in the middle of orgies Devereaux engages in with prostitutes or a playful consensual affair with a beautiful student or the dark, grunting assault on a maid, the camera is fascinated by Mr. Depardieu’s boar-like charisma and lack of self-consciousness. By the time the film is over, every one in the audience will be able to spot Mr. Depardieu’s butt in a police lineup if called upon to do so.
As impressive as Mr. Depardieu’s performance as Devereaux is, it is only half the story. Jacqueline Bisset plays Devereaux’s politically ambitious wife Simone, a woman whose family wealth makes it possible to bail her husband out of trouble.
Simone knows Devereaux is a “sex addict” as he calls himself, but she refuses to dump him for decades of unfaithfulness because she believes he has a good shot at becoming France’s next president. Their scorpionlike dance of mutual recrimination is very reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s throw down in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The brutal intimacy of the luxury apartment that doubles as Devereaux’s prison cell is the perfect backdrop for their explosive domestic battles. It is more mesmerizing, yet somehow harder to watch than all of the sex scenes because it is about things far more broken and intimate.
Ms. Bisset continues to be one of the most beautiful women to grace movie screens in the past half century. She also has the best lines in the film by far and is its most likable character, although she isn’t able to be the story's moral center because of her own compromises. Still, Ms. Bisset’s performance, which is concentrated primarily in the film’s last third is worth the price of admission. She is as charismatic as Mr. Depardieu, but gets to keep her clothes on and her dignity intact.