The 4K Ultra HD Bazaar, volume 29

There are films that attract crowds without ever pushing anything, biopics that simply unfold a life like a red carpet, with the same complacency, the same absence of risk. Michael belongs to this category: a product, a mechanic, a story that ticks boxes. And then there's Raging Bull. A film that, when it was released, didn't make the spectators run, but made a chill throughout the cinema. A film that didn't fill the theaters, but filled the story.

What strikes first is how Scorsese refuses the tradition of heroic biopic. He doesn't tell an ascent, he doesn't tell a legend, he doesn't even tell a trajectory. He exposes a man. A man who knocks, who knocks, who sinks. Jake LaMotta is not a character to love, neither to admire, nor to save. It is a raw block, a body that struggles against itself. Scorsese does not try to explain his flaws, let alone excuse them. He shows them, frontally, with no shadow, no morals. It is this almost violent honesty that has paved the way for another type of biopic: a cinema that no longer seeks to sanctify, but to understand, dissect, to look at the human in what he is most troubled.

And then there's boxing. Before Raging BullWe were filming a game like a game. After Raging BullWe couldn't. Scorsese transforms the ring into an echo chamber of the soul. Each blow becomes an inner beat, each slows a suspension of the world, each blows a confession. Boxing is no longer a sport: it is a language. A language of pain, rage, loneliness. The staging does not seek fidelity, it seeks the truth: an emotional, sensory, almost hallucinated truth. The ring becomes a mental theatre, a place where man is lost and found, where violence is no longer a gesture but a confession. An approach that will be echoed, decades later, in Smashing Machine, another dive into a body that destroys itself to exist.

This approach has changed everything. It has influenced generations of filmmakers, redefined how to film sport, opened the way to a cinema where the body becomes a narrative, where effort becomes dramaturgy, where movement becomes writing. Raging Bull showed that sport could be filmed as an intimate tragedy, an opera of flesh and light.

And at the center of all this is Robert De Niro. Its physical transformation has become legendary, but it is only the surface. What is upsetting is the way he lives in LaMotta, whose brutality, fear, vulnerability he lets touch upon. He doesn't play a boxer: he plays a man who doesn't know how to be a man. A man who knocks because he can't speak, who destroys because he can't love. This performance redefined what an actor could do in a biopic: not to imitate (not Jaafar Jackson), but to embody.

Raging Bull is also a survival film. Scorsese, at that time, is at the edge of the abyss. The film is his exorcism, his cry, his return to life. This urgency, this necessity, transpired in every plan. Perhaps that's why the film has such strength: it's not just a portrait, it's a confession. Not just a work, but an act. So yes, Raging Bull Didn't attract the crowds. But he attracted the filmmakers. He drew the eyes that matter, those who seek in cinema something other than entertainment: a form, a vision, a truth. He changed how to tell a life, how to film a body, how to understand a character. He moved the lines without making any noise. He left an indelible trace without ever trying to please.

There are movies that make noise. And there are some movies that are dating. Raging Bull belongs to the second category. A punch that continues to resonate, long after the lights have rekindled. And not sure that MichaelThe same can be said, in spite of all his vacarm.