Marty Supreme is a magnificent portrait of human arrogance (and not just the protagonist's)

There is something deeply seductive, naive, and American about Marty Supreme: in its protagonist and in the film that bears his name. Accompanied by enthusiastic reviews that presented it as a masterpiece, Josh Safdie's new work marks his solo directorial debut after the success achieved with his brother Benny Safdie (who this year directed The Smashing Machine, another very American film centered on a sportsman in crisis).

Just a few sequences are enough to understand the dominant artistic vision of the duo when they worked together: Marty Supreme is the natural heir to the films that brought the brothers success, born of the same tastes, built on the same logic. Josh Safdie revels in the absurd, unexpected, and often comical crescendo of tension that accompanies his protagonist in his attempt to get a chance: to challenge the greatest living table tennis player, a Japanese champion, and beat him.

Ping Pong and the American Dream

The film is divided into three very distinct parts. The first is the most recognizable within the sports genre and openly looks to the myth of the American dream. We are introduced to the world of ping pong from the perspective of the reigning American champion, which, for once, means starting from the bottom, from the periphery of a sporting empire that develops mainly in the East.

While in a politically isolated Japan, table tennis is a popular sport followed by everyone, in New York in 1952 it is little more than a pastime: ridiculed, ignored, practiced on the fringes of bowling alleys or in small gyms that attract peculiar types. It is here that the America Marty dreams of conquering takes shape.

Marty (played by Timothée Chalamet) is as prodigious with a wooden racket as he is with shoe boxes in his uncle's shop. He has an unstoppable patter, he's cocky, arrogant, audacious: "he'd sell shoes to an amputee." His nervous and irrepressible energy, the ambition that has shaped every relationship and life choice for years, has only one name: table tennis. In the Americas and Europe, he has no more rivals, but the reigning Japanese champion, just returned to the international scene after his nation's isolationism, seems out of reach.

Marty doesn't just want to beat him: he wants to conquer a place in the American sporting pantheon, become rich, famous, "make it" and make his sport make it too. Given the premises, one would imagine an ascetic, a rigorous athlete. Instead, Marty pursues his dream in the most chaotic and illegal way possible: he doesn't know how to exercise patience, nor accept rules. The recurring clash between him and Ando thus becomes that between two champions who have sublimated the character of their respective nations in the game.

In the first part, Marty dares, raises the stakes, risks everything, convinced that victory at the British Open can repay even the wildest bets. Obviously, it doesn't go that way. The film then plunges headfirst into a very long second segment, which openly recalls the previous Good Time and Uncut Gems.

Here Safdie builds an unstoppable progression of increasingly paradoxical, dangerous, absurd situations. In its best moments, Marty Supreme redefines the very narrative concept of "being willing to do anything": truly anything, for better or worse, just to get to Japan and get another challenge. It's kinetic, nervous cinema, proceeding with continuous jerks and accelerations.

A Film as Big as its Protagonist

Marty Supreme is a mirror of its character: long, overflowing, filled with details placed there purely out of creative desire. The crowd of extras (athletes, artists, entertainers, musicians lent to acting) almost resembles a Renaissance painting. It's an indie film only in its packaging, but absolutely "major" in its ambition: a cinema that isn't afraid to ask, obtain, always move big.

The project is in fact freely inspired by the figure of Marty Reisman, a legendary yet unknown American table tennis champion, but it also stems from Josh Safdie's personal passion: his uncle's stories of frequenting the New York underworld to watch clandestine matches, rediscovered years later thanks to a book bought for a dollar by the director's wife and left untouched on a shelf for a long time.

Chalamet, Total Star

The film is obviously entirely built around the aura of Timothée Chalamet: an actor who not only has enough talent, dedication, and energy to carry a film of this weight, but who in recent years has established himself as a true star. Perhaps the only true star, today, in the young Hollywood firmament.

The ambition to be "one of the greats," openly declared, his "aspire to greatness": Marty Supreme expands the boundaries of Chalamet the actor, or perhaps hints at how his star dimension sometimes risks overlapping with the character.

Desires, Obsessions, Violence

On the sidelines of the main story move the film's most interesting characters, who portray an America populated (from top to bottom) by selfish individuals, ready to do anything to exert power over others. This applies to the two women Marty oscillates between: a former actress, wife of an industrialist, who embodies a "stabilized" version of what Marty could become, and his childhood friend, married and pregnant, who has not yet given up on "trapping" him, an equally obsessive and destructive mirror of the protagonist.

In this world, the only true sin is lying to oneself, giving up one's desires. Deceiving others is almost always allowed, rarely punished. It is a society that is at times menacing, where power is exercised through money or violence, where the strong are at the top and bottom, and where every desire is tragically irrational.

The Limit of the Finish Line

The sports sequences, the matches at the table, are among the most compelling in the film: written and shot with precision, capable of fully exploiting the technological possibilities of contemporary cinema. They are the only truly linear narrative space, the only moment when Marty can simply be what he is.

This is why the third act, introducing a sudden softening and a moment of realization, partly dampens the strength of the discourse. After over two and a half hours of amoral and unrestrained racing, the film asks the viewer to accept a finish line that is crossed suddenly, for reasons that are not entirely clear.