«Fran Lebowitz – A life in New York», because Martin Scorsese’s documentary is not to be missed

The first time that Martin Scorsese decided to make a documentary about Fran Lebowitz, one of America’s most famous writers and humorists, was in 2010. The network was HBO and today, 10 years later, it is Netflix that allows the director to continue practicing the brilliant intuition he had right from the start: point a camera at Fran Lebowitz and let her talk about everything, of America, of New York, of cigarettes, of money, of humanity hunched over smartphones that he holds in his hands even when he walks and of talent that can neither be inherited nor studied at school because “the beautiful thing about talent is which is distributed in a completely random way, you don’t buy it and you don’t learn it ».

In the six episodes of Fran Lebowitz – Una vita a New York, Italian title far less effective than the original, which was Pretend it’s a city, Fran speaks and Martin laughs out loud at everything he says, struck by the causticity and the clarity of the judgments of a woman who has always remained true to herself and has always done good and bad times while remaining firm on her positions.

The tortoiseshell glasses, the shirt with the golden cufflinks, the masculine cut jacket, the Levi’s jeans and the cowgirl boots have been his trademark for forty years, just as are his ideas, the ones for which people are. willing to pay for the ticket and that, probably, no social network would allow her to express so freely and sincerely. Fran, on the other hand, is one of the few to boast of not having a mobile phone and of retaining the rare gift of looking at all the New Yorkers who, every day, risk hitting her with the car because they cannot take their eyes off those gadgets. infernal who rule their lives. Arrived in New York from New Jersey with $ 200 in her pocket, Lebowitz is one of the first women to insinuate herself in the salons of Greenwich Village, becoming the greatest expert. Cleaning the houses of the rich and capturing the whims that are consumed inside those wonderful apartments allows her to get a very precise idea of ​​the upper class and to write about it even if she does not belong to that world: in 1978 Metropolitan Life, Fran’s first book, sells 83,000 copies and throws it into the Olympus of the great, the Washington Post writes that she could be the greatest humorist of her time and takes us full.

fran lebowitz: cilantro
martin scorsese: pic.twitter.com/JoGwveHQCH

— E. Alex Jung (@e_alexjung) January 10, 2021

To watch Fran Lebowitz – Una vita a New York it shows us, in fact, how this woman keeps the point on everything, without retreating. From books that are the closest thing to a human being (“I just don’t know how to throw them away, even if they are ugly”) to the money that never excited her “but only terrified”; from civil consent to snobbery that never stinks of classism, if anything of the cigarettes that the then mayor of New York Bloomberg prohibited in public places, arousing his piqued reaction (“But do you realize or not that when artists are in a room and do they drink and smoke what happens is called art history? “). Fran Lebowitz’s strength remains, however, another: the innate gift of not being the spokesperson of any movement and of continuing to express its opinions without chasing popularity which seems to have bewitched all aspiring influencers on the planet. Fran, a woman, Jewish, shrew, lesbian and genius, is not interested in pleasure, and has no desire to feed clichés, if anything to destroy them (like when she says that for people no one can afford to live in New York “yet we are 8 million, we don’t know how we do it “). This is why we should look at her and fall in love with her, with the hope that Scorsese will continue to let her speak for years to come.