Suppose New York is a city: the great Le …

“Someone our age came to New York if they were gay to be gay. But we came here because you couldn’t live anywhere else, ”says Fran Lebowitz, looking at the camera in the first episode of Martin Scorsese’s documentary miniseries, Suppose New York is a city. Fran Lebowitz was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1950. She never played by the rules: she was kicked out of school. And when she came of age, she decided to move to New York with one goal: to be a writer.. His father gave him $ 200, Fran had never had so much money in his hands. His first thought was “This will last me a lifetime.” At home, they didn’t allow her to talk about money or ask how the economy works because she was a woman. All you need to know is how to be a woman. The education that her mother gave her was based on the fact that she was not funny with boys because boys don’t like it. “Unfortunately, he was wrong,” Fran says with a bored face. As soon as he arrived in New York City, he found that that $ 200 wasn’t enough to live for his entire life, so he started driving a cab. She was the only woman without telling the legend that another did exist. Fran desperately looked for her in the taxi bar because those around the male drivers mistreated her or claimed she was invisible. He later sold belts on the streets and also cleaned apartments, until his sense of humor dazzled Andy Warhol and he began to write a column in the famous pop artist magazine. , Interview.

The 7-episode, 30-minute mini-series mixes archival material with the present. Fran Lebowitz, author of the books Brief civility manual (1981) and Metropolitan life (1978), chat with Scorsese, or visit the places he hates most in New York City. Desire for the Big Apple of the 70s. He walks with a long cape covering his neck with a thick scarf, observing through his tortoiseshell glasses what bothers him the most: people. Fran is a curmudgeon cake; She hates social media, taxi screens that she can’t turn off, the streets of Times Square, Broadway musicals, yoga, airplanes. But his anger is not harmful, it’s funny. She makes fun of others, but also of herself like any Jewish actor.

He recounts the cries, he speaks hastily as if the words were escaping his mouth; turn your tongue into a springboard. You are so turned on by your anger that sometimes you have to run a hand over your lower lip to avoid dropping a little saliva on the floor. The joke always comes first. Fran would need a city to herself, but what would become of the actress without her complaints? What about our state of mind?

Martin Scorsese laughs at his friend Fran Lebowitz’s jokes like a baby who has just learned to laugh. He laughs so hard that he bounces in his chair and sometimes has trouble breathing. They have such a close admiring relationship that Scorsese had already filmed a documentary about her in 2010, Public speaking, and in 2013 gave him the role of judge in the film The wolf of Wall Street. Where, with his characteristic hostile face, he condemns Leonardo Di Caprio.

But Fran Lebowitz is never enough, there is always room for another complaint. Fran doesn’t talk too much about her gender identity and doesn’t hide it. It’s part of her daily life, like these plaques embedded in the ground of certain streets of New York with phrases from writers that she loves to discover between footsteps. Fran believed all his life that some things would never get better. He did not intend to attend the Marriage Equality Act. Young people today thank her for her fight for LGBTIQ rights, she is responsible for specifying that she has done nothing to reach them. “I don’t sacrifice myself too much, I assure you. Sometimes Fran Lebowitz walks around a New York model. Scorsese asks her what she would like to have, to which she responds “Godzilla’s rubber suit”. Because, above all, Fran Lebowitz is a spectacle.