Nawal Arjini at the NYRB:
The Hungarian poet Géza Röhrig, the Shark Tank shark Kevin O’Leary, and Timothée Chalamet walk into a bar. The bar is the restaurant of the London Ritz, and it’s 1952. Gwyneth Paltrow is also there, at another table. O’Leary, playing the part of the ink tycoon Milton Rockwell in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, notices the tattoo on the arm of Röhrig’s character, Béla Kletzki. “He used to defuse bombs for the Nazis,” says Timothée, as the ping-pong ingenue Marty Mauser. “Tell ’em the story you told me.” “My guests are waiting,” Rockwell replies. “Wait,” says Marty, “you’re gonna love this.”
Kletzki tells him that, out of respect for his table tennis talent, guards at Auschwitz used to give him unexploded ordnance to defuse, a job that allowed him to leave the camp for a few hours. One day he noticed a beehive, smoked the bees out, and covered himself in honey to bring back to his fellow prisoners under his uniform: cut to a poundingly soundtracked shot of starving men licking honey off Kletzki’s bare chest. While he’s telling this story the unibrowed, mustachioed Marty has been making grotesque faces over his shoulder to the fading actress Kay Strong (Paltrow), Rockwell’s wife; later that night she shows up at his room.
more here.
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