Despite the insistent disclaimers at the beginning of the film, Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York is very much based on a real life scandal: the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French diplomat and Managing Director of the IMF, in May 2011, at JFK airport due to allegations that he had sexually assaulted a hotel maid. Whereas Strauss-Kahn denied the assault, he did admit he was guilty of inappropriate behaviour. As expected, the civil suit was later settled out of court, but nonetheless the French diplomat resigned shortly after.
In Ferrara’s film, Gerard Depardieu plays Mr. Devereaux, a powerful corporate-type man who’s more of a sex maniac than anything else. He parties big time with prostitutes and employees alike, be they gorgeous and sophisticate, or plain and unattractive like the black hotel maid he forces into oral sex. Of course, it’s not all about sex, as there is also a craving for supremacy and control, drugs and alcohol. In drawing this merciless portrait of a hedonistic and yet ultimately doomed man, Ferrara goes for a larger picture that speaks of an entire political class at large.
Jacqueline Bisset stars as Mr. Devereaux’s wife, and while the physique de role suits her perfectly — picture an aging beautiful woman, as elegant as she is manipulative — her acting is not that memorable. You can’t help but feel she plays her part by the book, with not much of a personal input. In stark contrast, Depardieu delivers a compelling, deliberately over the top performance which turns his character into a sleazy, despicable man you wouldn’t ever want to cross paths with — his nude scenes often verge on the grotesque. Excess is the name of the game here, and it’s found in the foul language, the psychological and physical aggression, and most important, the absence of all kinds of loving sentiment. These are, after all, dehumanized beings.
As far as depicting the many situations and happenings Devereaux and company are involved in, Welcome to New York is impressive in its authenticity. Long takes capture algid moments and prolong them seemingly forever. But when the script tries to go deeper, meaning to delve into Devereaux’s pathological marriage and his equally pathological condition, or to account for past events and subtleties in the way characters relate, then it becomes too obvious and one dimensional. It’s when it attempts to explain and analyze what happens that it falls short. Because it becomes didactic, as if viewers hadn’t already grasped what the whole thing was about.
