Review: Welcome to New York

The names have been changed but anyone remotely familiar with the 2011 scandal involving IMF head and potential presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn's sexual assault of his hotel chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo will easily connect the dots in Abel Ferrara's fictionalised account Welcome to New York.

Here Strauss-Kahn is Devereaux (Gérard Depardieu), first seen in his Washington, D.C. office where the agenda appears to be pawing his more than eager female staff. His New York hotel suite offers more earthly delights - champagne, ice cream and a trio of high-end prostitutes courtesy of his associates. Just when the debauchery seems to have run its course, two more call girls arrive for the late shift with Ferrara, whose past films are replete with gluttonous scenes worthy of Pasolini, more than happy to continue in the display of writhing flesh and sounds of heavy breathing.

It may then be understandable, though by no means excusable, that Devereaux believes his hotel maid (Pamela Afesi) is there for the taking. After the assault, Devereaux has lunch with his daughter (Maria Mouté) and proceeds to query her new boyfriend about their sex life. This is not the behaviour of a man who thinks he's done anything wrong. Or, more pointedly, a man who has never paid the consequences for his transgressions.

Once arrested, arraigned, out on bail, and under house arrest in a New York townhouse, it's abundantly clear that his wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) has always come to his rescue. The scenes between Depardieu and Bisset are intense and sometimes heartbreaking. "I attempted to understand you," she tells him at one point and there's something in Bisset's body language and the weariness with which she delivers the line that conveys decades of futile attempts at curbing her husband's wayward impulses. Yet this is is also a woman who has seen her lifelong social strategising dissipate with Devereaux's latest indiscretion.

Isabelle Adjani was originally cast as Simone but had to drop out after journalist Marcela Iacub's tell-all Beauty and the Beast disclosed Adjani's past relationship with Strauss-Kahn. While it would have been wonderful to see the Barocco and Camille Claudel co-stars back together, Adjani would have imbalanced the film. Adjani is savage in her intensity and her playing Simone may have steered their scenes into Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? territory. Not necessarily a bad thing, but Bisset's underlying gentility tempers the viciousness.

Though Devereaux is ostensibly Strauss-Kahn, the character also serves as a representation of Depardieu, whose storied reputation as one of France's greatest actors has been somewhat sullied by his offscreen scandals and shenanigans. Though like Robert De Niro he has wasted his talents in inferior films, he is still very much capable of delivering a fully aware and committed performance as evidenced by 2006's The Singer (Quand j'étais chanteur) and 2009's Inspector Bellamy.

As Devereaux, Depardieu bares himself emotionally and physically and manages to elicit a modicum of empathy for a character rules by his Rabelaisian appetites. Depardieu has never been a conventionally handsome leading man and his added girth has led to audibly laboured breathing - yet you can see how charismatic he can be, how tender and poetic, how childlike and vulnerable, and, yes, how spoiled and animalistic.

Welcome to New York

Directed by: Abel Ferrara

Written by: Abel Ferrara, Chris Zois

Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Jacqueline Bisset, Maria Mouté, Pamela Afesi