Mr. Scorsese as president: saints and sinners

Presidential elections are on the horizon, billboards , promotional slogans, nerves on edge… There are many good ways to try to understand political life, but what if we transformed the tragicomedies of real life into good exercises in imagination? What if Marques Mendes, André Ventura, and Henrique Gouveia e Melo were the characters in a Martin Scorsese film? Coincidentally, the documentary Mr. Scorsese, directed by the American Rebecca Miller, premiered on October 17th on the Apple TV platform.

Politics cannot be understood without understanding the inevitability of life and our hidden desires. Politics is easily comparable to a good gangster film. One must be methodical, cold, calculating, and rational at the right moments; but one must also have a hot blood running through our veins, capable of yielding to impulses and madness. One must pretend for the public, convince people that we are saints, one must camouflage our unpolished sinful edges.

In Mr. Scorsese , we don't just talk to and about him. In five wonderfully crafted 50-minute episodes, we are forced to look into the abyss into which we throw ourselves when we live our lives. A man of almost 83 years, half a century dedicated to films, but the truth is that Scorsese is not just a filmmaker, he is a storyteller, but not of stories as they should be or as they become when the adulterated perfume of time permeates them. He is, rather, a teller of stories as they are, without embellishments. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver , Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy , Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence , or Henry Hill in Goodfellas are men to whom history has not sweetened the narration of facts. Scorsese does not deny reality. He does not deny that we are capable of mercy, but for whom mercy does not always have value or meaning.

The also great Isabella Rossellini, who was married to Scorsese briefly during the 1980s, describes him thus: “I always say that Marty is a saintly sinner, a santo peccatore .” Scorsese, for his part, doesn't hide his fascination with the characters he has brought to life: they are men and women whose violent instincts are not embellished for the moral delight of the public. At one point in the documentary, Martin Scorsese humorously recounts that one day, the director of Star Wars , George Lucas, told him that if he ended the film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore with a happy ending, he would rake in at least another 10 million dollars in profit. Scorsese laughs because he knows that life isn't like that and, even unintentionally, he still gives us a rather unusual moral lesson—that moral lessons are perhaps fantasies only for saints who live their entire lives pretending that they have nothing sinful within them.

The presidential race will be no different, and what would become of us if the candidates we have before us weren't themselves " holy sinners" ? But what is it that we fear so much within ourselves, that we eternally pretend that sins only belong to others? It will be like this until January. Marques Mendes, Ventura, and the Admiral will be accusing each other of sins, always denying their own, and investing in what is most holy within themselves. In the meantime, each one will accuse of sins the groups in society that best suit them, while sanctifying all the others who can lead them to victory.