This is sentimental television: from a city that you can't travel to right now and never again because it's gone.
And about a woman whose self-image and self-portrayal embodies the style and wit of the past 20th century to such an extent that tears almost come to your eyes.
Her name is Fran Lebowitz, companion of famous residents of New York (Leonard Bernstein, Frank Sinatra, Charlie Mingus), contemporary witness of the great upheavals in the history of this city - from the social and sexual emancipation movements since the 1960s to the real estate boom of the 80s to 9/11. Sep 2001.
Tobias Ruether
Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.
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The American director Martin Scorsese shot a seven-part portrait of his girlfriend Fran Lebowitz for Netflix - and about their hometown New York: "Pretend it's a City" tells in conversations and street scenes of a life in and with a special consciousness: New York, that's me .
And New York is like that because I live there.
And I live there because it wasn't possible anywhere else.
A claim like that—I'm as typical of my town as it is of me—can only be maintained if you constantly back it up with arguments, and that's ultimately become this extraordinary woman's (who, incidentally, moved from New Jersey) profession.
Lebowitz, aged seventy, is a legendary figure in American public life.
An author who rose to fame at a young age with reviews for magazines such as Warhol's "Interview".
And at the age of twenty-eight he wrote a book, "Metropolitan Life" from 1978, which became a style-defining type of diagnostic writing about the present and its fashions and psychoses, which can still be found in city magazines and feuilletons to this day.
But Lebowitz himself hardly writes anymore.
(She once says she hates writing ever since she got paid to write.) That's why magazines like Vanity Fair tend to see Lebowitz in party photos rather than read about her, always dressed in her uniform of jeans, blazer, shirt and cowboy boots.
But she's still a perfect talk show guest to this day.
That's why Scorsese stages them in the same way, if he doesn't quote from old appearances with David Letterman: Lebowitz, in conversation with the director and stars like Alec Baldwin, Spike Lee and Olivia Wilde.
How she lurks for keywords (internet, yoga, the “young people” in general, #MeToo, books) and then fires insights until she comes up with a final punch line.
Who didn't see their audience and maybe they themselves coming when the question started.
Incidentally, their most appreciative audience is Scorsese.
He laughs as soon as Lebowitz opens his mouth.
But Scorsese also had the brilliant idea of putting his girlfriend in the model of the city of New York that was built in 1964 for the World's Fair there and is now in the Queens Museum.
And there Lebowitz wanders between skyscrapers on the East River, talking, like a Godzilla of punchlines ("No one can afford New York, and yet eight million live here", "When you're older than fourteen, you don't have time to go up to wait for the bus).
This is elegantly subversive.
And a symbol of the pugnacious infallibility of Fran Lebowitz, who only rarely admits, once in a conversation with Spike Lee about basketball, that she could be wrong in her dominant world skepticism: what she observes are models of reality.
But more than making them will never succeed, given the never-ending mysteries of a city and the life it enables.
"If I could change anything, I wouldn't be so angry," Fran Lebowitz once said.
"The anger comes from the fact that I have no power,
Pretend it's a City,
on Netflix