Welcome To New York 2015

Strong stuff. This movie directed by Abel Ferrara takes the true story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn who was arrested a few years back for allegedly raping a hotel maid and shoves it in our faces. The film has a claustrophobic feel to it, no doubt partially due to Gerard Depardieu's enormous girth, he's like a slow moving boulder, a beached whale. This is a strong and brave performance by him, especially since he appears in the nude in quite a few scenes. He is not a nice man, but because of Depardieu's complex performance we are still able to feel something for him. He is matched by a very good performance by the beautiful Jacqueline Bisset as his very wealthy and unhappy wife who thinks nothing of paying $60,000 a month for a place to live in New York while she works to get hubby out of jail. The scenes of his arrest and jail time are among the best sequences of this kind of experience I've seen in a film, they're almost like a documentary that's how harrowing and true they feel. The film had its problems with the studio who cut some footage without Ferrara's permission, but actually I think the 108 minutes I spent with these people was enough time spent.