THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
Since the airing of its last episode, in 2007, time has only consolidated the cult around the series The Sopranos (1999-2007), monument of television culture, now irremovable fetish of a collective and globalized unconscious. Behind this masterpiece, a man, David Chase, author and showrunneur who, along with others, took the format of its age of innocence out of the way into a form of maturity, and television writing never quite got over it.
A cult amplified by the discretion of Chase, who has not signed anything else since, but revealed in an interview the existence of a prequel (episode preceding the series) in preparation, which would go back on the years of training of his hero , Tony Soprano. The icing on the cake, the young Tony would be played by Michael Gandolfini, son of James, tragically died in 2013 in circumstances that strangely echo his character in the series. What is more, the son is the doppelganger of the father. Short, Many Saints of Newark could only be expected with an almost religious fervor, coming to satisfy this childish desire to see a great fiction continue beyond its official end.
Set in 1967, in Newark (New Jersey), the film focuses on the itinerary of Dickie Moltisanti, father of Christopher (nephew and spiritual son of Tony in the series), who opens the doors of the mafia clan DiMeo to his nephew Tony . Populated by intrigues and characters, Many Saints finds intact the handwriting of the showrunneur, his speed, his particular rhythm which goes back and forth between quiet and detailed paintings of the Italian community (his meals, his funerals, his shoutings) and bursts of ultraviolence. As the series already suggested, mafia life and intimate life, far from being opposed, interpenetrate as in a psychoanalytic relationship between the repressed and his return, violence allowing (and financing) family happiness and success. social.
The infernal return of the same
Against the backdrop of race riots and in a postcard-style 1960s Newark filmed by Alan Taylor with a vigor supposedly reminiscent of Scorsese’s, Chase re-injects what was already Tony’s daily life: adultery, settling of scores, assassinations and wars of gangs. Under the barely naive eyes of a teenage Tony, a withdrawn spectator who is less a character in due form than a witness on the sidewalk awaiting his turn. Because if Dickie is so central, it is because his itinerary will weigh like a shadow over Tony’s life, and the whole stake of Many Saints of Newark is to show the infernal return of the same: more or less, the two men had the same life, both lived the same parody of masculinity which will lead them to their demise.
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