Welcome to New York (2015)

It is a performances centric movie

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

In New York, the French director of the World Bank Mr. Devereaux (Gérard Depardieu) is a pervert and womanizer, partying and participating in gang bangs with women. When he tries to rape the hotel housekeeper in his room, the woman reports to the police. Devereaux is arrested, affecting also the life of his wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset)."Welcome to New York", by Abel Ferrara, is a long, uneven and inconclusive film based on the New York v. Strauss-Kahn case. The story shows the lead character Devereaux as an egocentric, pervert and sick womanizer through excessive sex scenes and his relationship with his daughter and wife. When he is released in house arrest, the screenplay is developed at a very slow pace and is boring. However the lack of conclusion is terrible. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Bem-Vindo a Nova York" ("Welcome to New York")

Ferrara is an interesting author who has always cared more for editorial freedom than to commercial success, the Hollywood fame and popularity. Formed as an independent author in the twilight of the New Hollywood, Ferrara has made a number of films on different issues, from twisted comedy, through the mob, Catholic mysticism and vampirism, to obscure the horror and science fiction films. Art tells its own story. The artist has an obligation to be fair, or even decent. Ferrara is wiser than that to go on a cheap provocation and risks a lawsuit for damage to reputation, and in his case Strauss- Khan became Devereaux (Depardieu), and his wife Anne Sinclair became Simone (Bisset). The film, the most accurate way, deals with the distortion of reality in the world of the rich and powerful.

Even a good cast can not save Welcome to New York from the label of mediocre. The film tells the tale of a lecherous, moneyed Frenchman who is accused of raping a housemaid whilst staying in a ritzy New York Hotel. Gerard Depardieu offers up a reasonable if not exceptional performance as the male lead. His character is a rather revolting, dissipated type who is driven primarily by sex, which he equates with a disease.His character is not that complex and as such, not terribly interesting. By contrast, his long suffering wife, played by Jacqueline Bisset, offers up a passionate performance as a woman driven to pure exasperation and despair by a man she still loves in spite of his conspicuous faults. Its a very personal drama let down by limited character development and the rather stunted story line which leaves the viewer asking what it is they have just witnessed. Indeed, Welcome to New York really amounts to little more than a reiteration of life's realities, that the world is an unfair, unjust place where money makes a huge difference and the dysfunctional go on being dysfunctional.Five out to ten from me.

What is this piece of work? An auteur film? A low-budged shock movie like "La Grande Bouffe" or "Baise-moi"? A porno? Whatever the case, this catastrophic film makes you wonder whether Abel Ferrara has really been directing movies for 40 years. Inconsistent characters, uneven editing and dialogue lines that are laughable at best and disturbingly weak at worst make this this movie a really painful experience, like a great romantic Austrian orchestral piece performed out of tune all the way through. The exhaustingly long and slow vampire of a film that is Welcome to New York begs the questions: has the production been rushed for some troubled reason(s)? is that why it backfires on all technical levels? did they use rehearsal footage? is that why the acting is so all over the place? There are, however, a few interesting moments here and there in the film: Depardieu's monologue towards the end of the film, the lighting reflected on Jacqueline Bisset during a quarrel in the couple's home cinema. They're only details, unfortunately, and they're not powerful enough to save the film from drowning. Abel Ferrara proves that being a "unique" artist doesn't make you a "competent" one and, most of all, that you can't always blame gaucherie on art.