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| Business is good for Allen and Turturro in Fading Gigolo. |
««« Fading
Gigolo. Written and directed
by John Turturro. At selected theaters.
Summer belongs to the giants. But in
spring at least, tiny shoots have space to grow. One such rootlet is John Turturro's
Fading Gigolo—a movie so slight and
decorous it barely presumes the status of "sex comedy". But there's
something charming about this film's reticence, its reluctance to pretend it's
about anything more than the happiness of a few folks in contemporary New York.
Unlike most summer fare, it feels like it was made by people who have made
movies before, and fully expect to make a few more, no matter what this one
does at the box office.
Deep in multi-culti Brooklyn,
bookseller Murray (Woody Allen) and florist Fioravante (Turturro) have fallen
on hard times. In flash of accidental inspiration, Murray volunteers his friend
to service two Manhattan cougars (Sharon Stone and Sofía Vergara) on the prowl for
a skilled "plumber". Fioravante carries himself with a neat but
faintly funereal air, and his prior experience is purely of the amateur variety.
He rightly declares, "I am not a beautiful man." But Murray—in a
touching scene of behavior rare among straight males—convinces him that he has
the goods.
Before long, the boys have a
profitable business going. Assuming the pimp name "Johnny Bongo", Murray fatefully
overreaches when he tries to solicit the business of Avigal (Vanessa Paradis),
a young Orthodox Jewish widow still very much in grief. Here the script (also
by Turturro) threatens to go in the direction of Pretty Woman and other fantasies of cheap wish fulfillment, where the
contractual exchange of bodily fluids is redeemed by true love. But Turturro has
been around the block too many times to purvey bullshit. "L'amore è dolore," he says—"With
love, there is pain."
Not that loving the beautiful Paradis would
be particularly painful. Very un-Hollywood with her gappy teeth, the French
actress (and former Mrs. Johnny Depp) is a fitting antidote to the Bergdorf-Astoria
glitz portrayed by Stone and Vergara. Her appeal is entirely low-key and completely
in keeping with the charm of this film, which is funny but not droll, and
touching but not too grabby. This is a good date movie for people still getting
over their first divorces.
The biggest chance this film takes is
casting Woody Allen as a lead. Allen's spectacularly ugly battle with Mia
Farrow, including claims of pedophilia and counter-claims of child brainwashing,
has made him persona non grata in
some circles. No doubt there are people who will refuse to see this film purely
because of him. Turturro seems fully conscious of this, writing in a surreal
scene of Allen being "arrested" by a posse of Chasidim Jews and put
on trial on a morals charge. But Turturro has no idea how to finish this
thought, and the scene feels aborted.
Superficially, Allen's artistic spirit
looms over the architecture of Gigolo,
right down to the eclectic soundtrack. That's not saying much, however, given
that Allen himself borrowed heavily from Fellini and Bergman. Turturro's
sensibility is actually quite different: where Allen is twitchy and cerebral,
Turturro is meditative. Where Allen sees the shadow of mortality, Turturro sees
tragic poetry. The lyrics may be Jewish, but the music is Neapolitan.
©
2014 Nicholas Nicastro
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