Avis des critiques

[A] rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary... For all its tasty anecdotes, and there are lots of them, “Desperate Souls” is less concerned with production war stories... than with the emotional metaphysics of how a movie about a blinkered hustler and a homeless loser came to embody what Hollywood was becoming.

By relying less on the Netflix-docu sterility of relentless talking heads, Buirski creates a living, breathing depiction of an unsanitized New York during a time of incredible, destabilizing change... The result is a film that richly arranges itself in a state of disorder, but that sometimes doesn’t give enough time for interesting subject matter to coalesce into something meaningful.

[The film] is not unfocused but is very non-linear in its presentation, allowing it to meander from subject to subject with loose connections... [It] takes only a moment to discuss the success of its source material... When you use the words “The Legend of Midnight Cowboy” in a film's title, it only seems logical that more time should be spent on the movie itself.

At best, Desperate Souls suggests a series of passionate stories being told by a beloved family member, occasionally sprawling but never anything less than compelling. By the end there’s a sense of sadness that its shaggy pleasures are now in the past, rendering its faults comparatively minor.

Whether “Midnight Cowboy” deserves or can bear the weight that “Desperate Souls” accords it, the director Nancy Buirski presents these issues with a good mix of small-bore and big-picture insights and only the occasional overstatement or fuzziness.

A sumptuous documentary... Nancy Buirski throws everything into the mix, including archive news clips and cultural commentary, to produce a furious vindication of the film’s significance.

Burski wisely treats the film not just as her ultimate topic, but as the center of a spider web for other, equally fascinating subjects... [She] occasionally struggles to bring the disparate material together, wandering a bit too far afield, at points... But she mostly keeps the connections clear, and prevents the decoding from becoming too obtuse.

“Desperate Souls” retreads a good deal of Vietnam and cultural revolution context which have become accepted norms. It also treats Martin Scorsese’s 1970s films as proof of the legacy of “Midnight Cowboy”, as if it doesn’t stand up in its own right. Letting the movie do the talking often works best.

There’s a lot to pack in, and Buirski’s film could have been longer... [Midnight Cowboy] impacted most as a profoundly moving and real film about two damaged loners... navigating a society which shuns them. Her documentary is a snapshot of a time but also a continuation of a conversation.

Buirski tries to link the movie to the turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War, and these comparisons often seem forced... Buirski overstates the point without really providing enough trenchant insight to sock it home. The war is shown both at the beginning and at the conclusion of this film, and this emphasis seems strained.