The 77-year-old director’s thoughtful movie dispatch from his
New York study for Mary Beard’s TV culture show is an affecting treat, and an honest reflection on ageing
Martin Scorsese’s Zoom call to the world is a marvellous coup for Mary Beard’s
BBC Lockdown Culture special: a personal short film shot on his
smartphone – sometimes artlessly in portrait mode, sometimes giving it a clockwise quarter-turn for the more professional landscape format. (He does seem to be holding the phone himself.)
It is a brief, intense, ruminative snapshot about his life in his New York apartment during the lockdown. We see Scorsese brooding on his house arrest. At some moments, his face looks very glum, as if perennially struck afresh with the novelty of what is happening, the fact that there is no end in sight, and the impossibility of coming to terms with it until there is. Occasionally his face will be lit up with a smile that makes him look decades younger. We get tantalising glimpses of bookshelves, family photos, and what is conceivably an east Asian carved figure (something from his movie Kundun perhaps? Or maybe Silence?)