French film critic Yal Sadat was one of the experts who voted at the end of 2022 in the controversial list of the best films in history by the British publication Sight & Sound, which named Jeanne Dielman, 23, as the winner. quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels, by Chantal Akerman. He did not choose the Belgian filmmaker among his 10 favorite titles. He placed Martin Scorsese's “Taxi Driver” (1976) at No. 29. To express his obsession with “The New Yorker” – he watched “The Irishman” (2019) five times in a row, which he considers a living testament – decided he to record a film documentary, now available on Movistar Plus+, with the help of screenwriter Camille Juza, entitled Martin Scorsese: Hollywood Italian Style.
In this audiovisual essay he not only finds an excuse to spend two months rewatching his idol's films over and over again, but also makes the director of “Casino” the hero of the story. As if he were the protagonist of “America, America” by Elia Kazan. Scorsese used many characters in his films to tell the story of immigration to the United States, i.e. that of his parents. The boy of Sicilian descent, who grew up with his family in the Little Italy neighborhood and loved Westerns and historical Hollywood blockbusters, became a man who never stopped exploring his origins on the screen.
“His cinema is a search for oneself and a way to define oneself in one’s permanent dualities.” It is particularly striking in its beginnings. He asked himself: Should I be the new John Ford or the new Rossellini? “Am I a Hollywood filmmaker or one from New York?” Sadat told this newspaper in mid-January in Paris, where he was presenting this documentary.
Sadat takes advantage of the filmmaker's accessibility to the press in his early days to collect many of his testimonies. And it also benefits from Scorsese's own documentary drive. Italianamerican (1974) showed viewers what community his family belonged to through the everyday lives of his parents, Catherine and Charles. They chatted together around the table and the stove at a time when “the distance between Little Italy and the rest of the world was enormous,” Sadat remembers.
Martin Scorsese: “Hollywood Italian Style” shows a man always moving between two worlds, and that gives the Frenchman reason to think more broadly about “what it means to question identity on an existential level.”
Martin Scorsese and Liza Minelli during the filming of “New York, New York” (1977)
“This reflection makes Scorsese’s films more than just examples of good cinema: it gives them multiple layers of depth.” It makes him constantly question who he really is. Even his genre films have a sociological vision and an existential doubt. “In a way they are political in that they somehow take into account the disadvantages that his friends from his childhood neighborhood were subjected to,” defends the film critic.
During his studies, Scorsese met another up-and-coming director with whom he shared roots: Francis Ford Coppola. He helped him get into the industry and together they founded a small creative lobby with Brian de Palma. “But Scorsese wanted to do things so differently that he even made a musical that paid homage to a 1950s classic: New York New York. Back then, no one saw it in the cinema and the critics raved about it,” recalls Sadat.
As for all these autobiographical allusions, Scorsese remained very faithful to his previous life as reflected in some of his child characters, but with adult characters he preferred to play with sublimation and imagine how his life could have been different. “We recognized these differences during editing. At times he identifies with the talkative, cocky and even violent Joe Pesci in “One of Our Own.” It is as if he were playing and imagining what his fate would have been if he had not devoted himself to cinema,” he comments.
In fact, “One of Ours” was the turning point for Sadat, with which Scorsese managed to combine his two film identities, the most commercial and the most authoritarian. “It happened almost by accident, you could say. It was a mix between Mean Streets and The Color of Money. It's almost the metaphor of that American dream and the more capitalist United States that he had to deal with so often through the Mafia. “The Wolf of Wall Street”, which is in a sense also a gangster film and deals with similar themes, shows that the intentions of its cinema have not changed so much as that it does so only by resorting to a language that the The “Wolf of Wall Street” is closer to big Hollywood, more in the style of John Ford than in the style of Cassavetes.
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