Fading Gigolo

Director: John Turturro
Starring: John Turturro, Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, Vanessa Paradis, and Liev Schreiber
Distributor: Transmission Films
Runtime: 90 mins. Reviewed in May 2014

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Rating notes: Sex scenes, coarse language and mature themes

This is an off-the-beat, original film, typical of a Woody Allen movie, that is serious and comic at the same time. The comedy is supplied by the zany situations introduced in the film, and the seriousness belongs mostly to the movie’s dialogue and the resolution of the characters’ complex relationships with each other.

Murray (Woody Allen) is an antiquarian bookstore owner in New York City whose business has been ruined by the Internet (rarely, he says, “do people buy rare books”). He lives in a Jewish neighbourhood and the film is steeped in Jewish culture. Murray decides to close down his store, and look for something more exciting to occupy him in retired life. His friend, Fioravante (John Turturro, who directs and scripts the film) is a gentle Manhattan florist-arranger and a book clerk, who works for him part-time.

Fioravante lives alone with a lot of bills to pay, and he is tempted to earn extra money when Murray proposes to him that he hire himself out as a high-priced prostitute to service the sexual desires of wealthy women. His sexual predicaments become particularly complicated when Murray’s dermatologist, Dr. Parker (Sharon Stone) suggests a threesome with her best friend, Selima (Sofia Vergara).

Working as a Gigolo, Fioravante behaves much better with the women who hire him than either their fantasies, or his own, would predict. He treats the women he meets as “vulnerable” flowers …”to help their self-esteem”, which is not what they are expecting at all. He expresses tenderness and concern to Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a grieving Jewish widow; he talks gently to Dr. Parker; and he likes to treat all the women he visits in a considerate way.

There is an underlying moral tension in the movie. The basic premise of the plot is one that is morally provocative: one can play sexually fast and loose with women to earn money – but the outcome of the situations that are created more often than not assert both male and female yearnings for warmth and understanding. The classic witticisms of Woody-Allen-dialogue are there, and they play second-fiddle to the film’s overriding theme of low morality. Fioravante is a contemporary Don Juan with Casanova leanings, and Murray is his bumbling, loquacious manager, but the film uses them both well under Turturro’s measured direction to tap the situation’s comic potential. The acting talents of Allen and Turturro – and Paradis, in particular – make the film much better than its basic premise would lead one to expect.

The film has a lot of unusual targets, some of which pay off comically, while others not as much. One that doesn’t is Murray’s initial attempt to set up a grieving Jewish widow with a male prostitute. There is laughter to be found in the antics of an obsessive, Jewish Orthodox community patrolman, called Dovi (Liev Schreiber), who kidnaps Murray to subject him to a Jewish tribunal, though some of the comic elements in scenes like this one have the potential to offend. But always the script comically and cheekily comes to the rescue. As Murray is led off to a waiting car, full of Rabbis, he intones “I think you’ve got the wrong man – I’ve been circumcised”.

Typical of movies with Woody Allen in them, the film aims at providing whimsy and philosophical musings, and includes both. The plot is a crazy one, but one has to lay aside its enormous improbabilities to enjoy it working. And it is possible to do just that.

This is not one of Allen’s best film’s, but it is a very good one. Turturro develops a beautifully sustained relationship between Fioravante and Avigal as the woman he falls in love with. His excellent direction, Allen’s constant witticisms, and the soulful acting of Turturro and Paradis, make the movie a very enjoyable and a surprisingly thoughtful one.

As always, Allen is obsessed with sex, mortality, religion and himself, but his obsessions are reliably witty and entertaining.