There are some films you can just smell. Marty Supreme is one of them. Odours seem to seep from it – sweat, lust, dollar bills, desperation. In fact, it’s an assault on all senses. When it’s over, your ears are ringing from the squeak of sneakers on stadium floors, the barking of an injured dog, the incessant jabbering of a young New Yorker in pursuit of the American dream. And scorched into your retinas are the veins popping from Timothée Chalamet’s neck, the keloid scars forging paths across his hopeful, freckled face and, of course, the hypnotising to-ing and fro-ing of a ping pong ball.
Loosely based on the life of table tennis champion Marty Reisman, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is set over eight months of mayhem. It’s 1952, and 23-year-old Marty is working in a shoe shop in New York. The film begins with a tryst in the stockroom and ends with the birth of a child. For Marty (Chalamet), his job as a salesman is beneath him. Yes, he could “sell a pair of shoes to an amputee”, but he prefers to play table tennis, and my god, he’s good at it.
