Marty Supreme on Canal Plus: Timothée Chalamet breathtaking in a huge acting film (review)

Josh Safdie paints the portrait of a chattering table tennis player in a euphoric fifties epic, between praise of chat and reflection on the fantasy of eternal youth.

After bringing together more than a million spectators in French cinemas, and earning Timothée Chalamet a third nomination for the Oscar for best actor, Marty Supreme is broadcast for the first time on Canal Plus this Tuesday evening. Josh Safdie’s film, which was on the cover of Première last February, is also available for streaming on MyCanal. And we highly recommend it. Our review:

A year ago, in A Perfect Stranger, Timothée Chalamet played the role of an eccentric young guy who arrives in New York to see how far his dreams of glory can take him. Youth, the Big Apple, ambition: there are quite a few parallels to be drawn between the Bob Dylan biopic and this Marty Supreme that Josh Safdie (one half of the Safdie brothers now operating solo) custom-made for Chalamet. The action takes place this time in 1952, but it is again about a gifted guy, Marty Mauser, ready to eat life to the fullest. His weapon is no longer a guitar, but a ping-pong racket.

Marty thinks big, he has an inordinate ego and an insane chatter, he wants to triumph, seduce women, make table tennis popular (then considered a slightly deviant hobby), even if it means repainting ping-pong balls all over the world orange.

Deep down, he thinks he is “forever young”, as the Alphaville song on the intro credits says, as also said, well, well, a song of the same name by Bob Dylan, and as Timothée Chalamet himself seems to be, an actor who has decided to play, on the screen as well as on the red carpets, on the fascination caused by his youthful energy and his brash immaturity (…)