Marty Supreme is directed by Josh Safdie (Good Time, Uncut Gems), and stars Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a young table tennis athlete with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.
Set in 1950’s New York, the story immediately drops you into the relentless drive of Marty Mauser set against the chaotic reality of his life. As with all of the film made by Josh Safdie, and his former directing partner brother Benny Safdie, it’s filled with oddball characters that have strong personalities, a killer anachronistic soundtrack of mostly 80s techno pop music, and an incredibly rich cultural context with Marty’s Jewish family in New York forming the tapestry of his life.
With Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie once again reminds us that he knows how to make magic. He sees a sort of magic in people, everyday objects, and locations that others can’t ordinarily see and he transforms in into a cinematic artform that makes you feel something that was always there but you didn’t realise it. His obsession with different tokens, like the rare earth gem in Uncut Gems, the Spire bottle filled with million-dollar drugs in Good Time, are symbols which represent the obsessive personalities in his movies. Personalities who worship things because they symbolise their pursuit or fixation in life.
The same is true in Marty Supreme, whether it’s the hunk of the Egyptian pyramids that Marty brings home to his mother (in an emotional moment that interrupts his usual tendency of treating her awfully throughout the film), the Orange ping pong ball with Marty’s name on it, or the sperm which fertilises the egg in the opening scene that eventually turns into a match cut of a ping pong ball. These are all symbols that Safdie mixes with powerful music, and creative editing that uses the cinematic artform to transfix you in a religious, almost hypnotic fashion.
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