Welcome to New York (2014)

Very rarely does one see movies, especially Hollywood movies, made about high-profile Hebraic criminals. Of course, when such films actually do get made, like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which depicts the hedonistic Quaalude-addled times of psychopathic stockbroker Jordan Belfort in a 'fun' and 'cool' way, the kosher conman is portrayed in an absurdly favorable light, as if the chosen amongst God's chosen are held to a different standard when they commit crimes. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, Abel Ferrara’s latest feature Welcome to New York (2014) depicts the lies and crimes of a Jewish criminal, but luckily this film makes no pathetic pandering attempts to bend over for world Zion. Indeed, based on the 2011 arrest of former IMF chief and French presidential contender Dominique Strauss-Kahn—a pseudo-Frenchman of Alsatian Jewish and Sephardic Jewish extraction who is not surprisingly a member of the French Socialist Party (PS)—for sexual assault and attempted rape, Welcome to New York has already been condemned as being supposedly “anti-Semitic” and faces a dubious future in terms of an American theatrical release. Indeed, Strauss-Kahn’s ex-wife Anne Sinclair—a big financial supporter of Israel who comes from a family of wealthy Jewish art dealers based in Paris and New York City (she is the maternal granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, who represented Pablo Picasso, and made a ton of money during the Second World War)—complained in an editorial that Ferrara’s film is an “anti-Semitic” work where the “filmmakers project their fantasies about money and Jews.” Although he has never seen the film and claims he never plans to, Strauss-Kahn recently had his lawyer Jean Veil reveal on France's Europe 1 Radio that he is getting ready to sue the makers of Welcome to New York for supposed “defamation owing to the accusations of rape and insinuations which run throughout the film.” After watching Ferrara’s Strauss-Kahn flick, I have to say it is, rather unfortunately, not at all anti-Semitic, unless one is deranged enough to believe that portraying a man of Jewish blood who is convicted of attempted rape in a negative light is anti-Semitic. Indeed, like most of Ferrara’s work, Welcome to New York deals with the very Catholic theme of redemption, but as the film reveals, there is no redemption for an over-privileged and obscenely arrogant sex addict with seemingly infinite power who can afford to do whatever the hell he wants, or so he thinks until he attempts to molest the wrong poor negress maid. A work where Ferrara goes back to his unflattering roots, Welcome to New York is easily the director’s most sexually explicit work since his debut porn flick 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976). Rather unfortunately, the film is not the comeback masterpiece that the director probably hoped it would be, even if it is infinitely more interesting than Ferrara’s previous pseudo-apocalyptic abortion 4:44 - Last Day on Earth (2011). More than anything, Welcome to New York is an unintentionally humorous frog sideshow act set in modern-day Sodom where a morbidly obese Gérard Depardieu grunts, humps, and flaunts his shriveled pénis and bulging gut off in a rather foul fashion that is more likely to humor the viewer than make them deeply consider the moral failings of a powerful Franco-kosher sex addict. Indeed, a largely improvised work, or as Ferrara revealed in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter: “Every performance is an improvisation. The writing of a script is an improvisation. We wrote the script and we worked on the scenes. Chris Zois, the writer, was on the set. He was there with the actors. OK for some of the actors, Baby Jackie [Jacqueline Bisset], the lines were important. For Gerard, the lines weren’t important. For me, I don’t want to hear the fucking script, especially if I worked on it,” Welcome to New York is a decidedly degenerate little mess of a strangely merry yet misanthropy-inspiring movie where Depardieu proves that, despite his rather odious obesity, he can still act with a singular sort of anarchic tenacity that reminds the viewer why the French have historically romanticized criminals and egomaniacal sexual deviants. 

 As Gérard Depardieu tells some journalists at the beginning of Welcome to New York as to why he chose to portray Dominique Strauss-Kahn (under the pseudonym 'John Devereaux'): “Because I don't like him […] I don’t trust politics. I’m an individualist…I’m an anarchist. I don’t like people that mix politics…I hate them.” Indeed, debauched IMF chief Devereaux hopes to be the next president of France and his power-hungry Zionist supremacist wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) is determined to make sure he achieves that goal. Unfortunately for him and his much suffering family, Devereaux is a self-professed “sex addict” who even gets excited upon hearing about his daughter’s sex life. Indeed, Devereaux may be so repulsively fat that he even has trouble walking a couple feet without perspiring, but he has a little friend named Viagra that gives him the sexual pseudo-potency he needs to engage in multiple orgies and threesomes every single damn day. The first place we see the antihero display his debauchery and self-entitled arrogance is at his international bank's Washington, D.C. headquarters, which he has turned into a not so discrete high-class makeshift whorehouse of sorts that is occupied by tall Nordic callgirls with tasteless tramp stamps who offer free blowjobs to more dignified clients of the bank. Of course, the party does not really get started until Devereaux flies to NYC and goes to an orgy where he, a small and effeminate frog of the stereotypically swarthy sort, and a small French-speaking Capoid-like negro indulge in a number of expensive streetwalkers in a luxury hotel room. Looking for a little bit of privacy, the IMF chief takes a prostitute into a backroom, forces her to give him head in a ridiculously rough fashion (he almost seems to pass out in the process since he is so fat), slaps her large tits fairly hard, and finishes the happy hooker off by performing cunnilingus on her. After drinking some whisky-cognac-Viagra milkshakes with his multicultural entourage, Devereaux ends the hotel party, but the party has just begun for him, as he has two high-dollar Russian hookers come to his hotel room later that night. After watching the two Slavic skanks engage in streamy Sapphic sensuality, Devereaux joins the fun by penetrating one of the girls’ doggy-style while she performs cunnilingus on her comrade. Clearly not satisfied with the multiple orgies he has partaken in during that single day, Devereaux attempts to force a less than homely negro maid to give him a blowjob after she unwittingly walks into the quasi-demonic degenerate's room after he gets out of the shower. Addled with arrogance and sexual aggression, the IMF pig declares “do you know who I am?” to the Maid, but she begs “no please” and eventually manages to flee the room after being semi-molested. After eating at a fancy French restaurant with his daughter and her new boyfriend and bragging to them about how he confessed to the press that he is a proud womanizer, Devereaux heads to JFK airport, but he does not make the flight as two cops, a black and East Asian, arrest him after being charged with attempting to rape the black maid the night before.  Indeed, at least momentarily, the party has ended for the Semitic socialist party animal.

 Of course, in his unwaveringly arrogance, Devereaux proclaims he has “diplomatic immunity” upon being arrested, but the hardened NYC cops are immune to his pathetic pleas of pretense. Being too fat for normal handcuffs, Devereaux complains his hands hurt and a tough cop rightfully retorts with the remark, “too fucking bad.” After endlessly bitching to the cops that he wants to make a phone call, Devereaux is finally able to get in contact with his family, with his no less arrogant Zionist wife Simone complaining upon hearing the bad news, “I should just let him sit in jail…he’s destroyed everything I’ve worked for.” After being denied bail (they don’t want him to pull a Roman Polanski and run off to France or Israel), Devereaux is taken to prison by two black cops who mock him for being so pathetically fat and slow. One of the black cops also yells at the IMF pimp for his arrogance, warning him, “You ain’t no tough guy here, man…stop that shit.” After being pushed around by a couple negro thugs in a holding cell, Devereaux faces the complete and utter humiliation of being strip searched by two black officers, who laugh at his incapacity for putting his clothes on in a timely fashion, with one of the policeman jokingly remarking, “Some workout, huh, putting your clothes back on.” Since he is a stinking wealthy swine, Devereaux eventually manages to get out of prison after paying $1 million dollars in bail and agreeing to pay $60,000 a month for a court-approved apartment. Naturally, Devereaux is verbally reamed by his wife Simone, who clearly wears the pants in the relationship, upon being reunited with her. When Devereaux attempts to play the victim to his beloved by stating his life has been turned upside down by the recent series of events, Simone becomes infuriated and shouts, “Your life has been upside down since the day you were born. I tried…God knows I tried…YEARS…to make you into a man. Do you know what a man is? You don’t know what a man is. A man knows about consequences…protecting the wife…a man doesn’t follow his dick into every dark alleyway and whore that crosses his path.” Of course, Devereaux also uses the excuse that he is a “sex addict,” adding, “I didn’t get a blowjob, you know…it was a setup […] I just jerk on her mouth…that’s all. That’s my sickness.”  Naturally, as a man who believes he suffers from a sickness, the disgraced IMF pig feels no need to cease his depravity, even while embroiled in an international sex scandal.

 Naturally, Devereaux immediately goes back to banging random women, including a statuesque French-speaking negress that he meets at a 'ethnic' art museum. After watching a private screening of François Truffaut’s Bed & Board (1970) aka Domicile conjugal in his lavish apartment, Devereaux is once again verbally attacked by his wife Simone. After rationalizing his sex crimes by pleading to his wife, “It’s a crime that I want to feel young?,” Devereaux proceeds to attack his beloved’s family for being war profiteers, so Simone hatefully states to her hyper horny hubby, “You couldn’t put your face where my father put his ass.” Of course, Devereaux eventually gets around to sexually assaulting another woman, even in a manner more violent than he attempted with the black Maid, but luckily the young lady gets away. Naturally, Devereaux is eventually cleared of all charges after the Maid is discredited (which was his lawyer’s goal from the get go), thus saving the sexual predator from being the sexual prey of hordes of dark-colored honky-hating prisoners (indeed, the IMF head would have served a 20 year sentence had he been convicted of rape). When Devereaux goes to a psychiatrist, he complains that his wife wants to leave him, his girlfriends have left him, and that no one returns his calls, as if it is a big surprise. When the psychiatrist asks the dejected Judaic frog about his feelings on the whole ordeal, Devereaux passionately states: “I’m sorry to say that, but I feel nothing. I don’t feel guilty, I don’t give a shit about the people […] No one can save anyone. And, do you know why doctor? Do you know why? Because…no one wants to be saved. That is the irony I only recently understood…no one wants to be saved.” Indeed, at least Devereaux is honest. After Devereaux accuses his wife of paying someone off to free him of the sexual assault and rape charges, Simone harps on about her disappointment in her hubby, stating to him, “I didn’t want to be president…I wanted you to be president…you would have taken France in another direction,” as if a sick socialist sex predator is the kind of leader an already degenerate, malignantly multicultural, and conspicuously corrupt nation like Frogland needs. To Simone’s credit, she certainly has a point when she says to her husband, “You’re expendable because you act a certain way […] What I will say is…so much has been done for you…and you didn’t appreciate it.” In the end, Devereaux manages to have a conversation with a young Hispanic maid named Marti (Raquel Toro) that does not result in the obese Hebraic ogre attempting to rape her. 

 When Abel Ferrara was recently interviewed by AFPTV and asked whether or not his film Welcome to New York was anti-Semitic, the auteur attempted to portray himself as a philo-Semite and responded in his typically verbally spastic fashion by stating, "Am I anti-Semitic? No, I was raised by...well, you know, I hope not, okay. I was raised by Jewish women, so as an Italian boy...I'm like, you know…I’m not an official member of the tribe but I’m there, you know.” In fact, during the same interview, Ferrara stated in a quite groveling manner in defense of his depiction of Strauss-Kahn’s wife’s art dealer father Paul Rosenberg, “He was not a collaborator. He was almost killed by the Gestapo. He was completely the opposite. He was very nearly killed like six million Jews.” Indeed, aside from one single scene that most filmgoers would not understand, Ferrara’s film gives no indication that Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his (ex)wife Anne Sinclair (who divorced him in March 2013) are members of the Hebrew tribe. Of course, what the film does do is demonstrate that Strauss-Kahn and Sinclair are exceedingly arrogant international parasites who, for what was probably the first time in their entire lives, faced minor hardship after the Hebraic presidential hopeful attempted to stick his circumcised prick in the wrong brown prole hole. As with most of his cinematic antiheroes, Ferrara chose not to portray DSK in a cliché one-dimensional fashion, but instead as a weak and pathetic pig who, when everything is said and done, seems rather lonely and unloved (after all, his wealthy wife is a mega-bitch), hence his love of soulless lechery. Unquestionably, the film’s greatest merit lies in star Gérard Depardieu's crazed, flamboyant, grotesque, and even absurd improvised performance. Indeed, not since his quasi-pornographic role in Marco Ferreri’s The Last Woman (1976) aka La Dernière femme aka L'ultima donna, where the French actor waves around his erect member, has Depardieu given such a delightfully depraved and uniquely unhinged performance. If anything, DSK should thank Depardieu for portraying him in such a memorable way, as Welcome to New York surely makes the disgraced French socialist politician seem more interesting and likeable than he really is. Apparently, when Guido commie auteur Bernardo Bertolucci saw Ferrara’s work, he stated, “This film reminds me of a Warhol film.” Indeed, as its sardonic title indicates, Welcome to New York features a damning depiction of the rotten Big Apple that is no less unflattering than the films of Paul Morrissey, as a work that is just as much about NYC as DSK. In that regard, Ferrara is one of the most important filmmakers that New York City has ever produced, as a sort of gutter poet who makes mostly honest celluloid anti-tributes to the superlatively shitty city and its eclectic collection of uniquely unsavory inhabitants. That being said, I can only guess how Ferrara’s upcoming Pier Paolo Pasolini biopic will turnout, but at least a gay communist Guido poet/filmmaker with a nostalgia for his Catholic roots makes for a more interesting subject than a powerful Jewish sex addict.  Indeed, Ferrara's bargain bin Catholic morality is certainly lost on Judaic subjects as Welcome to New York demonstrates.

-Ty E