Critics reviews

Like most of Ferrara's recent work, Welcome To New York has the aura of a modern day parable, and achieves a sense of grand universality despite its minimalist design... Like that under-seen masterwork [Go Go Tales], Welcome To New York expresses an incredibly intimate portrait of the city.

It's through the scenes of Deveraux's most depraved behavior that one gets a full view of his entire outlook on the world from the position of a man who can buy anything. These alterations also disrupt the flow of the film, which originally played as a redux summary of Ferrara's entire career, moving from a softcore beginning to a crime procedural before settling on a chamber drama that uses Cassavetesian exaggeration to reveal subtle emotional truths.

Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch, whose collaboration with the director dates back to The Driller Killer, achieve remarkable effects with minimal lighting. Often they cast heavy shadows around the human figures but create swaths of golden light behind them, the lighting scheme a visual metaphor for spiritual decay amid luxury.

The film's first half is truly wonderful... After that, however, the film falters somewhat. Which is odd because these later scenes also feature what might be the best performance in the film — Jacqueline Bisset playing Devereaux's wrathful, disappointed wife, Simone, herself the heir to a large fortune and whose ambitions for him are perhaps even greater than his own.

After the heady, nauseating bacchanalia of the early scenes and the brightly lit, coldly sober and mean rawness of the prison and court scenes, the film's final act is a drag, over-banking on the interest of the marital discord Devereaux's criminal behavior has wrought.

The ferocious fights between the couple, which, puzzlingly, are carried out mostly in English—even though the UK-born Bisset is fluent in French, a bilingualism that her costar hasn't quite yet attained—often come perilously close to farce. Depardieu's untamable vowels ("I don't need your monay!") and elision of prepositions ("I jerk on that lady. On her mouth") are almost as bad as the truisms that Bisset must deliver: "The other side of love isn't hate—it's indifference.

Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, King Of New York) wildly blurs the line between star and role, opening with an out-of-character interview with Depardieu, and staging Devereaux's arrest and booking with real cops and corrections officers. Stripped, self-destructive performances are the director's stock-in-trade; his best work intersects the lurid with the tragic, finding that point where self-destruction and addiction erupt into emotional violence.

Ferrara's directorial achievement in "Welcome to New York" is mighty and terrifying. The filmmaker has every right to be upset—but should also, nonetheless, remain proud. It seems likely that his own R-rated cut of the movie would have remained much closer to his own original version. At the same time, for all the indignities inflicted on the film by Wild Bunch, the movie is still Ferrara's own.

Depardieu carries on his gargantuan body the weight of a magisterial performance, incarnating the neo-tribal chief of a most powerful clan whose daily routine of immaterial speculations is inversely mirrored in its impetuous carnal ravenousness... Depardieu completes with this film his own accidental trilogy about contemporary masculinity, that in almost reverse order recounts the undead corpse of the patriarch (the previous two episodes being Ferreri's La dernière femme and Bye, Bye Monkey).

The film's peculiarly exhilarating effect can be attributed to a sense of social outrage that's transcended for the sake of metaphoric social clarity.

Here we are trying to square the circle, or trying to reconcile the perfect image of evil with the perfect image of license—but in a way divorced from Christian moralizing: more Nietzschean. Orgiastic, a trainwreck, the far side of what some might call privilege, but which is here perhaps better termed sovereignty. Mere privilege is the watered-down version; these manifestations of sovereignty are what are running/ruining the world—a far more important target.

I don't have feelings. I don't feel guilty," Devereaux announces as he awaits trial, while his wife, Simone (Jacqueline Bisset)... exasperatedly chastises his behaviour. Ferrara continues to excel in his depiction of such moral grey areas, and Welcome to New York proceeds to end on an appropriately ambiguous note — slyly appropriate, that is, as the film has long since handed out its verdict.