I’ve discovered my favorite in the race for the Best Picture Academy Award this year. I wrote ‘favorite’ meaning the film that I liked the most out of the ten nominated (well, out of the six I’ve seen – I still have three to watch and one I’ll never watch). It’s ‘Marty Supreme‘ directed by Josh Safdie. Apparently it’s a sports film about a sport – ping-pong – that seldom appears on screens, except for one of the famous episodes in ‘Forest Gump’. Rather, it’s the biography of a champion of this sport, loosely inspired by a real character, born in New York and internationally recognized as a master of table tennis a decade after the end of World War II. As in his previous films, especially those made with his brother Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie‘s new film proposes a hero who does not find his place in the society around him, endowed with immense talent and an even more impressive ambition, constantly daring and taking risks, making mistakes after mistakes and making catastrophic decisions one after another, a hero that as a viewer you cannot help but love.
Marty is a New Yorker, just like other heroes in Josh Safdie‘s films. However, it is about New York in the 1950s in a neighborhood with a large Jewish population which had gone through the tragedy of the Holocaust only 10-15 years earlier (some were survivors, most had families that had disappeared or been destroyed). Marty is a young man, extremely talented at ping-pong – perhaps the best in New York or in all of America – and at business the way a young man raised on the streets understands business. The big international competitions take place abroad – London, Paris – and to get to them, he has to get the money by any means necessary. Any means can mean theft, seducing the wife of a tycoon who sponsors sports events, or accepting humiliations that would deprive others of their own dignity. At a competition in London, Marty wins everything until the finals where he faces and is defeated by a Japanese champion, representing another nation trying to raise up from the ashes of war. The rematch means a trip to Tokyo, but Marty has quarreled with everyone who could help him: his family, the boss he worked for, the tennis federation. However, the impossible is not acceptable to the hero of the film and he will risk everything to reach the confrontation at the top.
New York in the 50s has been depicted in many other films from those years to today. But never like this. The reconstruction is meticulous, but the nervousness of the editing is modern and the soundtrack belongs more to the last decades of the century. Understanding the game of ping-pong is an advantage, but it is not key – the tension of the confrontations crosses the screen anyway. Timothée Chalamet enters the role formidable and the comparison with Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, who played similar roles of young rebels on the streets of New York, is inevitable. He is a typical and atypical American hero at the same time. He has a dream and to achieve it he is ready to do anything, including destroying himself and those around him. I am a big fan of Gwyneth Paltrow and her return to the screen in … the role of a star returning to the stage delighted me. I hope it is the sign of a lasting return, because I believe that she still has many wonderful roles waiting for her. I would also mention the name of Odessa A’zion, a young actress, with a special physiognomy and full of talent, who transforms a ‘small’ role into a significant one. Not since Tarantino have I seen such raw realism on screen, but in Josh Safdie‘s violence (not just physical) is not sought for show or ratings, but justified by the story and the context his characters find themselves in. With ‘Marty Supreme‘, Josh Safdie has become one of my favorite directors.