Abel Ferrara has been responsible for some of the edgiest, genuinely disturbing and shocking films over the past 30 years, so it’s something of a surprise that this effort is so mundane. Set in his beloved New York, Ferrara usually portrays the seedy, violent underbelly of the city, while trying to find the moral compass in there somewhere Bad Lieutenant and King of New York being classic examples. Here though it backfires Ferrara has picked a far loftier target, but the result seems rushed, under-written and garbled, and the ultimate effect is numbness rather than any shock.
Depardieu is first seen discussing the role he’s about to play in the film to a gaggle of journalists, the sort of clip usually seen as a DVD extra. He tells them he cannot find his character, who is not only unlikeable, but empty’. Depardieu plays Mr Devereaux, a wealthy, powerful French businessman on a flying visit to New York. As soon as he checks into his hotel room he calls up some prostitutes, and the first 30 minutes of the film is basically a high-gloss porn film, with Devereaux having sex with various call girls, grunting his way as he does so.
It all goes wrong for him when the maid appears and Devereaux forces her into a sex act against her will. Remind you of anything? Well, apparently we’ll all be sued if we point out the obvious comparison with real life, so let’s say no more about that. The film then takes a different turn when Devereaux is arrested at JFK for rape, and is hauled through the dreadful US justice system. He gets off, of course, thanks to his obscenely rich wife, Simone (Bisset), who had plans for him to become President of France, which his libido has now ruined.
The third act is the two of them having an argument about what he has done, her shattered dreams and his apparent peace with what he has done.
The amazing, and odd, thing about the film is that it just as it appears to have had virtually no script the first 30 minutes consists of Devereaux grunting on top of hookers it becomes a workmanlike police procedural, and then the final scene reveals depths and levels of interest not even hinted at for the first hour. Devereaux is a shambling mess of a man, a sex addict who we cannot have sympathy for, yet in the final scenes we hear how he became so powerful, how he was a brilliant economics student, an idealist with dreams for saving the world and ending poverty slowly dragged down into the mire of the super-wealthy. It’s very strange, and leaves you wondering where this sort of detail was in the first hour.
There are real problems here though. The casting of Depardieu is clearly meant to give a grativitas to the role, but perhaps when the director called for a heavyweight he didn’t mean literally. Depardieu’s girth now is so vast he resembles a circus performer at one point a cop jokes that merely taking his clothes off to be searched is quite a workout, huh’. The problem is that he is supposed to be utterly irresistible to women, and the sight of him bedding a beautiful black teenager is absurd when it is supposed to be serious. A parallel scene, where he tries to force himself onto a young reporter, is disturbing for the wrong reasons.
The casting of Bisset too is a real problem. Once a striking woman, her role as the ambitious, Lady Macbeth-style woman behind the powerful man is far too much of a stretch. Her accept veers wildly from French to Cockney to mid-Atlantic, and her final crucial scenes with her powerful husband flops because of her limitations.
Overall verdict: For a police procedural version of a famous real-life case this is adequate, for an Abel Ferrara movie it’s something of a disappointment, one amazing scene apart. It lacks bite and darkness, which for Ferrara is strange.
Reviewer: Mike Martin