Fran Lebowitz embodies a certain idea of the New Yorker, intellectual with a sure taste and caustic lines. Martin Scorsese has dedicated a documentary series to him, to see on Netflix. For the New York press, it is the best antidote to the gloom that, in the midst of a pandemic, has gripped the city.
“Is there a more delightful show than Martin Scorsese enjoying someone’s company?”, interrogates The New Yorker. The New York filmmaker’s bursts of laughter punctuate If it was a city, the documentary series he dedicates to his great friend Fran Lebowitz. The glances that this one sometimes gives him, to verify that his witticisms hit the mark, are just as tasty. The title refers to one of those caustic repetitions of which she has the secret, when she attacks tourists or passers-by who, with their noses in a map or on the screen of their mobile phone, suddenly freeze in middle of the sidewalk and prevent others from passing: “Pretend it’s a city !” One way of saying: act as if you were in a city, with people around you!
An institution inherited from the seventies
Little known in France, Fran Lebowitz, 70, is an institution for the inhabitants of the Big Apple. Born into a Jewish family in New Jersey, she took to the chase as soon as she could. She moved to New York in 1969 and never left. Acerbe observing the faults of her contemporaries, she is “A writer famous for not having written anything for decades”, raises, a little cruel, the tabloid New York Post.
Author of Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), two collections of remarkable humorous texts that have remained unpublished in French, she has indeed (and by her own admission) subsequently experienced a lack of inspiration. So much so that his work, “For the past forty years, has essentially consisted of being Fran Lebowitz: a brilliant, determined, grumpy woman, with a sharp tongue and who likes nothing so much as giving her very decided opinion on anything and everything”, abstract The New Yorker. It multiplies conferences and paid interventions across the country – “Especially on university campuses, where young people love it”, specify it New York
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Marie Béloeil
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