Suppose New York is a city (Pretend It’s a City, United States / 2020) Direction: Martin Scorsese. Photography: Ellen Kuras. Duration: 210 minutes Qualification: suitable for people over 13 years old. Available in: Netflix Our opinion: very good
Fran Lebowitz She is a well-known writer, comedian, and occasional actress, but at her core she is a brilliant speaker and icon of New York City, the city she came to from Morristown, NJ, 50 years ago in her early twenties. Fran is also friends with another famous New Yorker, Martin Scorsese, who had already dedicated the documentary Public Speaking to him a decade ago.
Trailer of Let’s Suppose New York is a City, by Martin Scorsese – Source: Netflix
01:21
–
The seven episodes of half an hour each of Suppose New York is a city are, therefore, a kind of sequel, extension and update of that film produced by HBO and they allow us to immerse ourselves in the scathing, ruthless, arrogant and brilliant thought at the same time, of someone who has no qualms about defining himself as “irritating, infuriating” or admitting that he has “opinions about everything” and is dedicated “to judge others “.
In the personality of Fran Lebowitz Oscar Wilde and Woody Allen, Gore Vidal and Dorothy Parker, Larry David and Hannah Gadsby seem to coexist with a look that looks like a cross between Diane Keaton and Patti Smith. There is in it much of the tradition of Jewish humor, the disenchanted gaze of New Yorkers and the acidity of the great polemicists. Scorsese is not only his friend, admirer and neighbor, but here he acts as an interviewer and a companion of adventures (at times he is like a buddy movie in which Marty celebrates him and laughs out loud at all of Lebowitz’s witty outings.) But Suppose New York is a city It is not just a one-man show from Lebowitz (although each of her public appearances has something of a stand-up feature) but a critical celebration of a city that she loves and hates at the same time.
The protagonist says she enjoyed the seedy and bankrupt New York of the 1970s more than this one with ultra-modern buildings and invaded by tourists (the series was shot before the Coronavirus pandemic, of course). The maker of The wolf of Wall Street (film in which Lebowitz played a judge) appeals to a charming resource (placing it on a perfect and gigantic model of the city) and a lot of archive material (including Fran’s talks with David Letterman, Spike Lee, Alec Baldwin and their great friend Toni Morrison, to whom the documentary is dedicated) to reconstruct not only the life of the author of Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, but also the different eras of New York. In fact, in each of the episodes very different topics are discussed: public transport in general and the subway in particular (Lebowitz was for a long time the only female taxi driver in the city, where she also worked as a cleaning worker or street vendor. ), architecture and real estate speculation, music (a tour that includes the New York Dolls, Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Mingus, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye and the Motown sound), artistic significance and its disdain for “high” culture , pleasure and fun, a fascination with money, activism and the #MeToo movement or health and sports, all the way to his love of reading, public libraries and bookstores in the latest installment.
Scorsese, as a good New Yorker, a brilliant observer and a sensitive and generous man that he is, shows that the key to portraits lies in apparently inconsequential details, in investigating certain obsessions and phobias. See Lebowitz touring the city to discover the most diverse and ridiculous plates that are on the sidewalks or his misadventures with apartments and money in a Manhattan that has become inaccessible to anyone who is not a millionaire (or almost) are moments in those in which the filmmaker and friend discovers the essence of a multifaceted and unclassifiable woman who is also an inescapable reference when it comes to understanding why New York was and is it? one of the most fascinating cities in the world.
BESIDES
– .
