In images, in picturesWith “Armageddon Time”, in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, filmmaker James Gray returns to his favorite New York, between Brooklyn and Queens, where he spent his youth. Photographer Adrienne Grunwald followed in her footsteps, showing the popular face of the American metropolis.
–
At 12, James Gray dreamed of making movies. His parents thought he had no chance. “James, look where we are. We don’t have any relationships. We live in Queens! », his mother would have said. An anecdote told by the director to the New Yorker in 2019.
At the time, the Gray family occupied a modest pavilion in the largest of the five boroughs of New York (nearly three times the area of Paris). Their neighborhood was kind of that of sitcom character Archie Bunker All in the Family, very popular in the United States during the 1970s and which still embodies the archetype of the racist and reactionary white worker.
Russian-speaking Jews, the paternal grandparents of the future filmmaker, Greyzersteins who became Gray on Ellis Island, had settled in the small Odessa of Brooklyn, where the Russian mafia still made rain and shine. The ban on serving alcohol to minors not being strictly enforced in the neighborhood, that’s where he went out to have fun.
Aspirational outsiders
In competition at Cannes, the eighth feature film by the American director, Armageddon Timeresurrects this New York adolescence, and more precisely the circumstances of his parachuting into a school in the beautiful districts of Queens attended before him by Donald Trump, future President of the United States: the Kew-Forest School.
“When you grow up in Queens, Manhattan is kind of an enchanted kingdom where you’re not invited. » Christopher Spelman, film music composer
It was in this private establishment and thanks to the film club co-founded by his Latin teacher, Christopher Spelman, the instigator of countless outings to Manhattan cinematheques, that James Gray discovered the films of Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola. “When you grow up in Queens, Manhattan is kind of an enchanted kingdom where you’re not invited,” comments Spelman, still a teacher at Kew-Forest and composer of the soundtrack ofArmageddon Time. “Almost all of James’ heroes are underdogs. They are steeped in aspirations of all kinds. Manhattan symbolizes all that is out of reach. »
In The night belongs to us (2007), nightclub manager Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) abandons his plan to “conquer Manhattan” to avenge his family of police officers in the reeds of Jamaica Bay, on the wild edges of the metropolis. The mother of Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg), the protagonist of The Yards (2000), dreamed of him as a white-collar man among businessmen who commute to office districts every morning, instead becoming entangled in a corruption scandal in Queens.
You have 39.05% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
–
