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Director/Coscreenwriter: Abel Ferrara

By Roderick Heath

Abel Ferrara has been one of American cinema’s lawless heroes since his feature debut in 1979 with the punk-slasher-art film The Driller Killer (1979). Born in the Bronx, Ferrara negotiated film school and the hard-knock college that was the arty bohemia of 1970s New York, complete with early ventures into porn, before his erstwhile breakthrough became a centrepiece of the “video nasty” debate in Britain and marked Ferrara in many minds as a sleaze merchant. His follow-up, Ms. 45 (1980), stirred polemical debate with its portrait of a young rape victim going on a misandrist killing spree, but also caught many film critics’ attention for its jarring and vigorous blend of raw immediacy and high style. Ferrara’s work superficially evoked Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma: he shared the former’s feel for New York, the latter’s sense of spectacle, and both men’s fascination for violence and contemporary degenerateness conflicting with flailing moral scruples. Ferrara, however, spurned the relieving dollops of playful cinephilia those directors usually offer, hewing closer to the scruffy Catholic-schooled atheist cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini and pushing his themes to extremes that always seemed to have one foot planted in the old Times Square grindhouses and the other in a seminary library. After spending the ’80s directing punchy, wilfully grunged-up B-movies like Fear City (1984) and China Girl (1987), Ferrara dabbled with the mainstream for a time, directing episodes of “Miami Vice” and a studio remake of Jack Finney’s Body Snatchers (1991). But he also built up a head of auteurist steam that gained him acclaim as a wild talent with works like King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992). The acclaim of the latter film promised big things, but the mid-’90s instead saw Ferrara’s career go awry with increasingly demanding, uncommercial films like The Addiction (1995), and for the last decade or more, his work has generally landed straight on DVD.
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With Welcome to New York, Ferrara’s gall proves still copious and potent, as he tries his hand at that old ploy of the professional muckraker, the fictionalised, torn-from-the-headlines, true-crime melodrama—in this case, the matter of Dominique Strauss-Khan, the French head of the World Bank whose stature and political intentions were toppled by accusations he molested an African immigrant working as a hotel maid in the Sofitel New York Hotel in 2011. The case was such a perfect triangulation of contemporary concerns, invoking a swathe of opine-fit topics, from rape culture to colonial fallout to one-percenter arrogance, that if a dramatist written them they might have been dismissed as a corny attempt at being edgy. Ferrara’s film has no pretence to being docudrama or reportage, and the pileup of issue-isms finds him largely uninterested: it’s easy to imagine one of his characters noting the essential feeling that innocent victims are boring. Welcome to New York is, rather, an attempt to digest the myth of the event and translate it back as purposefully rude art for the audience.
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The attraction of the material lies in Ferrara’s lifelong fascination with transgression and sin, suffering and sensual greed, base impulse and transcendent yearning. The film’s title alone presents a flotilla of sarcasm, taken from the sign that hangs over JFK Airport’s exit: for Ferrara, who’s been exiled from his native stomping grounds for a time, it’s a homecoming just as much as it’s a romp in a foreign land for his Strauss-Khan avatar, Devereaux (Gerard Depardieu). Ferrara playing the impresario of forbidden delights and damnations has an ironic edge at first, considering this new New York he surveys could barely be more different to the place he filmed in the ’70s and ’80s. That place had its id on full display, and the underworld more visibly met the elite out on 42nd Street. Now, Ferrara kicks off with an interview that deliberately blurs the lines between the famously difficult, ornery actor and his character before leading in with a montage of money printing and shots of grandiose financial institutions around New York, promising that some cheesy Michael Moore or Oliver Stone-ish agitprop is on the way. But whilst the power of capital is certainly one of Ferrara’s targets here, there’s another joke in play, as he suggests the old traffic of New York, both fiscal and flesh, has simply shifted indoors and gone upmarket.
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Consequently, much of the first half-hour or more of Welcome to New York is a depiction of the sustained orgy that is Devereaux’s life. Our introduction to this bacchanal comes when an advisor, Roullot (Ronald Guttman), visits his office to warn him about some of the problems about to beset him as a potential French presidential candidate whilst Devereaux’s collection of female employees-cum-concubines try to ply him with creature comforts and oral sex. Devereaux heads over to New York for a getaway and books into a swanky hotel, where he invites the attractive concierge (Ilinca Kiss) to join in his depravities, an offer she politely turns down. His pals and procurers, Pierre (Ferrara regular Paul Calderon) and Guy (Paul Hipp, who also sings the mournful version of “America the Brave” heard at the outset), bring hookers quite literally in shifts to keep the wealthy, perpetually horny plutocrat serviced, and they join him for a sex party where Pierre mixes up milkshakes and pours the froth over the women.
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Pierre and Guy leave satiated, but before going, Guy brings in two more prostitutes, and Devereaux starts all over again into an extended threesome. When the two hookers leave, they pause to make out in the hallway before ducking out giggling after a family with kids stray into view, whilst Devereaux looks on from his room door. The spectacle of real desire between the two women but excluding him, their paying squire, seems to sit uneasily with him, stoking him to an even more bullish and intransigent state. In the morning, a maid (Pamela Afesi) comes into his room to clean up, and Devereaux grabs her and rubs her face in his crotch against her frightened protests until she bites him and flees. Devereaux dresses, packs, and heads to the airport. But the maid has reported the incident and two cops, Landano (Louis Zaneri) and Fitzgerald (James Heaphy), cook up a way of extricating him from the plane to arrest him. Devereaux soon begins a journey through the gullet of the New York justice system.
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Much like Scorsese’s more overtly charismatic, but also more easefully entertaining The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Ferrara is starting with an obvious point—that one great spur to acquire riches is to indulge one’s various appetites to the extreme. He invites the audience to share both jealousy and disdain for this fat, aging, rich, white man as he uses other people, particularly women, as existing to gratify his tastes, and then walks the stereotype into contradictions. Ferrara has often played about with medieval concepts and ethics of clan, overlordship, gladiatorial strength, even vampirism, lurking within the modern body politic, and like the eponymous King of New York, Devereaux goes a step further, setting himself up as a barbarian ruler with a harem and pleasure garden within the anodyne gloss of the hermetic one-percenter life. Like the protagonist of Bad Lieutenant, Ferrara seems to feel for his protagonist even more keenly and become all the more determined to penetrate to the root of his soul the worse he acts. Both Scorsese’s take on Jordan Belfort and Ferrara’s take on Strauss-Khan confront characters whose drives spin out of control and become self-destructive in part because they can’t live by the petty hypocrisies and arbitrary boundaries others, including even most other rich people, honour or are seen appearing to honour. As Welcome to New York unfolds, it gradually becomes clear that Devereaux is actually on the run from something in his life and taking refuge in conspicuous consumption. His comeuppance, the subject of the film’s middle third as he’s hauled over the coals by system and family, could even have been invited, or is at least the logical fate Devereaux has charged at like a wounded bull even as he rants about how everyone who judges him can go fuck themselves.
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Ferrara is one of the few directors standing who has passed through just about every level of American filmmaking save the blockbuster, having started off in the lowliest precincts of the industry imaginable. Part of the charge of his cinema lies in the way he’s never entirely shaken off the grindhouse ethic of raw effect and played at getting respectable even as he become an ever-more individual and fearless artist. Ferrara digs the pornographic fantasia Devereaux drapes himself in, and has no problem showing it or twisting it around on itself, as young, naked courtesans give way to old, naked Depardieu. Ferrara’s dead-eyed portrait of Devereaux as he’s swept up by the cops, charged, jammed into a holding cell, transferred to a prison to await a bail hearing, and submitted to all of the procedures and petty humiliations imposed on a detainee recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s similarly stringent interest in criminal procedure in The Wrong Man (1956). The motive is the same: both films track a man whose interests the justice system is designed to defend being submitted to its dehumanising indignities, except that where Hitchcock deliberately portrayed an innocent man and scratched at the edges of his sense of bewildered innocence, Ferrara allows no illusions about Devereaux’s status as a creep, but still insists on immersing the audience alongside him in his travails. “Do you know who I am?” Devereaux demands of the maid as he advances on him, and, as the line’s use as its poster tagline confirms, it’s the shibboleth to the whole affair, the slipstream of wealth, repute, and power Devereaux is used to easing his path.
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The world Ferrara creates is entirely impersonal. The halls of JFK, the tasteful, deadening minimalism of the hotel, rolling surveys of lingerie-clad bottoms, the grey halls of justice, and the $60,000-a-month house Devereaux’s wife rents for him to wait out the subsequent legal proceedings are all filmed in the same tones and hues and with scarcely a skerrick of personality or individuality. Everything is commoditized in the bubble in which Devereaux lives, and it’s that bubble Ferrara is fascinated by and wants to explore. Whilst he never suggests apologia for Devereaux (or Strauss-Khan), Ferrara insists on travelling with Devereaux on his journey so that the weird logic in his actions is laid bare: in a drug-addled, sex-frenzied state in a world where everything’s offered up to him, he sees the latest woman to stray into his room as just another flower to be plucked. (Ferrara’s anger at the film’s edited and reshuffled U.S. cut is entirely understandable in this light: he wants us to ponder Devereaux with the ironic distance of people who know he’s guilty rather than excited by a preoccupation with the question.) Ferrara does not, in the end, try to pass Devereaux off as Strauss-Khan unalloyed, but as his idea of a man passing through similar situations. Devereaux contains evident aspects of both Depardieu—an idea Ferrara warns the audience about right at the outset with that interview—as well as Ferrara. The way Devereaux acts in his holding cell, pacing back and forth, snorting through his nose and bewildering his fellow prisoners, suggests it’s not the first time he’s experienced such a moment, and perhaps Ferrara means to suggest that like Depardieu and himself, Devereaux may be a long-coddled celebrity, but still carries the streets of his youth tattooed on his corpuscles. This becomes more possible as aspects of Devereaux’s character and history leak out, lending the film, however vivid and straightforward it is in most ways, a quality of performance-art provocation.
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When Devereaux is arrested, the cops don’t quite know “who” they’re dealing with and take some quiet delight in degrading his type for a change, making jibes about his weight and leading up to a lengthy sequence where he’s submitted to a strip search, a vision unlikely to make it into the annals of popular internet nude scenes and yet Depardieu offers something majestic in his nakedness with his grandiose paunch and refusal to be cowered. Rescue, if temporary, comes in the form of his wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset), on whom he uses his one phone call to fetch from the midst of a banquet (being given in her honour for her support for Israel, no less). Devereaux’s odd family life has already been suggested when, just before his arrest, he has lunch with his daughter Sophie (Marie Mouté) and her Canadian preppie boyfriend Josh (JD Taylor) and insists in shocking him, in a way with which Sophie seems familiar, by asking him with salubrious gusto how their sex life is. Simone, an heiress with a colossal family fortune at her back who wants to play kingmaker, is also very familiar with her husband’s proclivities. Her entrance into the film turns it into a study in marital perversity as Simone’s loyalty to her husband and readiness to bail him out is matched only by her fierce anger and frustration that he’s completely pissed away his shot at being president—an ambition she imposed on him, he says, to satisfy her own ego, but which she argues was his great chance to make good on his talents with her family fortune at her back. Devereaux finds the whole business, and that family fortune, an onerous thing. His intransigent wilfulness and reflexive ass-covering surge to the fore as Simone call him to account: “I didn’t do it!” he repeatedly bleats, meaning he didn’t rape the maid, before explaining with ferocious miming just what he did actually do.
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Crucially, Devereaux debases himself in such moments as he debases others, as Welcome to New York is in part a document of the man who, stripped not just of illusion but also of pretence, attempts to be honest with himself and others, and is taught in the course of the exterior drama that there’s a terrible price to be paid for being honest when it collides with the laws of society. His need to defend himself demands he put a temporary damper on his rawness for Simone, the media, and the forces of the law, and this necessity infuriates him more than anything else as partly the appalling gall of a man who’s let his soul turn septic and is willing to blame others for it, and partly a spoilt child dedicated to its appetites and reflexes and chucking a tantrum when denied. But it’s also something subtler and less easily and comfortably assimilated by witnesses: a crisis of spirit that’s left his sense of common humanity in a yawning void. This has turned Devereaux into an existential shark, out of a wilful, almost philosophical choice dictated by his realisation there’s nothing else that means anything to him, and his own discomfort with playing roles vividly contrasts with the way he can make others play them. “I wish I could have helped you stop,” Sophie tells her father as they talk after his travails have destroyed her relationship with Josh. “I didn’t want to,” he replies, and then, after a moment’s contemplation, adds: “Correction— I don’t want to.” He wants to keep living large in a manner that seems like a 17-year-old boy’s dream of the high life. Just because he’s in trouble doesn’t mean he’s finished with a drama that started long before the film starts and won’t finish until long after.
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To illustrate this, Ferrara stages two scenes late in the film in pointed contrast that almost seem intended specifically to bait the audience into blind alleys of understanding about Devereaux. First, attending a ritzy reception at an art gallery, he displays his beguiling side as he extemporises on a painting to the fascination of gathering ladies, including a beautiful young French-African woman named Marie (Nneoma Nkuku), a law student who wants to work for the International Criminal Court: the two slip into flirtation that segues into a night of easy lovemaking. Devereaux is debonair, romantic, still able to use his natural gifts rather than money to get laid, passionate and genuine with his lover. That Marie’s black and a young, spunky idealist seems to speak to something in Devereaux, because it’s the first time Devereaux is seen at his best. Perhaps it’s the last tiny fragment of his youth we’re seeing him use up here. Ferrara seems at his most casual, almost careless in framing this sequence at this point in the film, but in fact, his sly and ruthless wit is working most concertedly under the surface to subvert, if briefly, the rhetoric of race and history surrounding the Strauss-Khan case that buzzed on the airwaves and internet, giving us instead dashing leftist hero and lover. So, of course, Ferrara follows it with Devereaux at his worst: when he tries the moves on a young journalist who comes to the rented house to interview him, he offers compliments on her book as a down-payment for nooky. She turns him down, so he begins trying to strip her naked against her frantic protests, until she finally breaks free and dashes out without her blouse. Ferrara leans in like a romantic only to pour a vial of acid in our laps, reducing Devereaux to greedy, bratty, brutal lecher.
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Devereaux’s duality, and beyond that, everyone’s duality, connects with one of Ferrara’s singular recurring themes of people dragged between extremes of transcendence and debasement. So, too, is the theme of the good person worn down by the world’s evil and embarking on a journey through their own underworld, a notion that connects most of his work, and here most particularly recalling Lili Taylor’s distraught humanist turned bloodsucking monster in The Addiction, whose idealistic impulses readily transform into corrosive nihilism and hungry exploitation. A similar process has beset Devereaux when the pricy defence team Simone hires sends him to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, a process he describes in contemptuous terms to Simone. But later, Devereaux wanders the streets at night, with his unleashed confession to the shrink heard as ethereal voiceover, a meditative description of his pathos. Declaring himself an atheist, but “When I die, I will kiss god’s ass forever,” he describes the process that took him from brave, young crusader who signed up to battle the world’s poverty, which slowly and insidiously overwhelmed him by its scale, to wanting to squeeze every last drop of sensual gratification from his own life as he runs from success, from fear of aging, and from his wife’s plans and political ambitions.
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Simone’s labours work, naturally: the case against Devereaux collapses for unstated reasons, and there’s nothing left then but Devereaux’s smug smile and Simone frustration at his seeming belief that some sort of natural justice has won out. “The other side of love is not hate—it’s indifference,” Simone mournfully tells her husband even as she proposes they return to France determined to maintain their best face, whilst he turns to the household maid and asks what she thinks of him. She says he seems nice. Why seek blessing when you can buy it? Welcome to New York doesn’t quite have the ferocity of Ferrara’s best work, but it’s still a major film by a highly undervalued filmmaker, and Depardieu and Bisset offer performances amongst the finest of their careers.