NETFLIX. Fran Lebowitz by Martin Scorsese: funnier will be the fall

Without Martin Scorsese, of which it is the second realization for Netflix, the French public would surely never have heard of Fran Lebowitz. In New York, where she has lived for over fifty years, she is an icon. Her lectures are sold out, she is regularly invited to television shows and one of her most famous quotes (truncated) is reproduced on mugs and gadgets sold in Times Square, the place she hates most in the world. world. When she’s not reading on her sofa, her favorite activity, she walks around Manhattan, attends shows (which she finds appalling), finds in the few bookstores that have resisted Amazon.

Arriving in New York in 1969 with $ 200 in his pocket, Fran Lebowitz was a taxi driver, housekeeper and peddler, before being noticed for his columns published in the press. She knew Andy Warhol, was close to Charlie Mingus and Toni Morrison. Homosexual, she saw many of her gay friends die of AIDS in the 1980s. Author of several books of successful humorous essays, not translated into French, she made a few appearances in series or films such as the Wolf of Wall Street, by Martin Scorsese.

An unrivaled art of digression

If it was a city, a series of seven thirty-minute episodes, was born from their friendship and their complicity. In the interviewer position, Scorsese, who regularly bursts into laughter, films Fran Lebowitz at the very select private club The Players, on stage, in a public chat, at Grand Central Terminal station or at the public library. from New York. On an original soundtrack by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington or Richard Rodgers, we see her strolling through the streets with a determined step, wearing an irresistible scowl. Complainant, sarcastic, avid smoker and follower of cufflinks, she exhibits, with an art of digression and unequaled fall, her iconoclastic positions on writing, money or public transport. Quintessence of the New York intellectual, Fran Lebowitz, whom Scorsese makes walk on a gigantic model of the city, literally embodies the Big Apple and its history. Portrait of a woman and an extraordinary city, this series is a marvel of humor and intelligence.