Cinema’s Current Obsession: The Desperate Man

“I have a purpose. If you think that it’s some kind of blessing, it’s not,” says Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme. “It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.”

That very specific thing, for Marty, is the nearly impossible task of somehow pulling enough money out of thin air to pay his debts and fund his trip to compete in a ping-pong championship taking place in Japan. Ironically, Marty Supreme features very little actual ping pong. The majority of the movie is about one particularly audacious young man going to often comically absurd (and morally dubious) lengths to “achieve his dreams,” and more specifically, to somehow acquire the money to fund those dreams.