An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since I used to be a huge fan of Abel Ferrara, I thought I might as well check it out. I say ‘used to’ because I believe that the guy was one of the most fascinating directors in the 90’s but, afterwards, his movies became rather obscure and, to be honest, I didn't see most of them. Anyway, at last, he finally came up with a very interesting project obviously based on the scandal around Dominique Strauss-Kahn who might have assaulted a maid in his hotel room in New York. To be honest, the beginning scenes were rather sordid and you hope that, in real life, it wasn’t so bad but, apparently, Strauss-Kahn was indeed quite a sex-addict. And of course, 3 years after this movie was released, there has been the Harvey Weinstein scandal which displayed that powerful and rich men might become some insane sex craved monsters who, in the process, might completely ignore the consequences for their victims but also for themselves. So, the material was maybe dark and morbid but it did have some potential and it seemed to be a perfect fit for Ferrara who has always been a rather bleak director. And, yet, it seems that the guy did struggle to make it really work though. Indeed, there were some good chunks during which nothing much really happened. Another issue was that the second half was mostly about the relationship between Devereaux and his wife which wasn’t a bad idea. However, for some unknown reasons, both characters kept switching between speaking French and English, sometimes even within the same sentence. It didn’t make much sense since both characters were French and since Jacqueline Bisset speaks French fluently. Anyway, the end-result was just jarring. To conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was not bad at all and it was pretty neat to see Ferrara delivering a solid directing effort after all these years.