In May 2011, a 32-year-old maid at the Sofitel New York Hotel brought charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a key member of France’s Socialist Party and managing director of the International Monetary Fund, alleging that he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room. His subsequent arrest became headline news around the world; in the wake of his criminal trial, other women came forward with allegations of sexual assault, and Strauss-Kahn fell rapidly from political power. Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York is plainly based on this scandal; Ferrara cast several of the New York City cops who dealt with Strauss-Kahn as fictionalized versions of themselves, and even shot scenes in the fancy New York townhome where the Frenchman served out his house arrest.
When Ferrara says “where this guy’s been,” he’s referring to Strauss-Kahn’s alleged sexual debauchery, which the filmmaker considers a compulsion comparable to alcohol or drug addiction. The original cut of Welcome to New York wallows in Devereaux’s ugliness for its first half hour, as he parties in his hotel suite with several prostitutes and two unidentified male friends. Devereaux laughs boorishly, slurs his words, and grunts like an animal at times. A good deal of this material has been excised for the American release, much to the film’s detriment. In the European cut the scenes depicting Devereaux’s arrest and time in prison covers almost exactly as much time as the sex party, and this symmetry advances the idea that Devereaux is a prisoner in his own skin—first he’s a slave to physical sensation, then he’s a body being frisked, undressed, and inspected by the police. The hedonism of the first hour is inverted in the remainder of the film, when Devereaux wrestles his soul.
Directed by Abel Ferrara
