Painting used to be a major form of art, as it represented reality through the eyes-and the mind-of the painter, and this act wasn't waiting for the surrealists to invent it as it was inherent in every attempt to represent reality(always an act meaning to link the outside with the inside-reality with perception).Photography and then cinema took over the responsibility of this act, as they both appeared more capable of aiming at the real;meanwhile, a demand for more reality lead to aesthetics(growing in the cinema world like cancer) supposed to emphasize the impression of the real-the worst example of this tendency being perhaps the decay of horror film through the limitless repetitions of camera shaken films that followed the example of Blair witch project- and that impression of the real(always created by manipulating means) became the god of a new world where the demand for truth was believed to be satisfied through the revelation of this reality;that alone was taken as enough to guarantee justice, a remedy to fight all illnesses, racism first of all(which became the top topic of every thinking man), and disillusion as well(the spectators of the contemporary fantasy films laugh at the usually more imaginative means cinema used to use to create its monsters when digital was an unknown word). And then comes Ferrara with his movie, one I wasn't sure I was interested in watching, to remind us of that old painters ethos that used to be trade mark of all great cinema-and still is, in rare cases- painting a real story(more real it couldn't be, and watch here Ferrara is not interested in the subjective element of reality of a Rasomon type)with his palette of pictures,shadows, sounds and edits that refuse to give a dramatic and manipulative tone(compare this with the terrible Gone girl) to the film and create a true work of art that,as all modern art does , is not devoid of meaning, but incorporates the meaning in its form and the austerity with which it gets close to-or keeps a distance from-the characters of the story.So Ferrara, bringing in an aesthetic that reminded me of Robert Bresson, succeeds where Scorsese with his Wolf of Wall Street failed, succeeds even more in giving a cinematic portrait of New York unlike any other, lighting the places in subtle ways and creating poetry out of the ordinary.Furthermore, Welcome to New York is one of the most anticomformist movies ever made attacking political correctness with its power of lack of judgment(although the civilization of moneyworld is surely judged and condemned right from the start)and the thoughts it aims to provoke in all of us regarding the inner truth and the world we are living in.A master film by a director I hadn't appreciated enough in the past.
Review of Welcome to New York
