Fading Gigolo
Film & TV
I met with a friend last week for dinner and a movie. We were to see Fading Gigolo, a light-hearted-looking film starring John Turturro and Woody Allen as leads, and a great cast of minor characters, so it seemed like a perfect night out.
We rushed dinner to make the film on time and I was loath to sit on only one glass of wine, as we hadn’t seen each other for a while. In hindsight, we should’ve ordered that second glass and accepted a late arrival to the film; we wouldn’t have been lost to the plot in the slightest, and the extra alcohol might have worked to make it seem funnier than it was.
Turturro plays Fioravante, a man easily persuaded by his long-time friend Murray (Allen) to become a gigolo. Turns out Murray’s dermatologist (Sharon Stone) is interested in a threesome and is willing to pay a man to join her and her friend Selima (Sofia Vergara), and since Fioravante has just lost his bookshop, finances are a bit of a worry. He acquiesces, bringing a new face to “gigolo” and a new sensitivity.
When Murray, now firm in his role as “unlikely pimp”, sets him up with Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a Hasidic Jew widowed two years and unaccustomed to anything outside her Orthodox religion, she agrees to a massage from Fioravante, opening up her world to touch, and opening up Fioravante to the possibility of love.
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The characters are interesting and are played well by all the actors (Paradis, in her first English-speaking role, is particularly convincing, and Turturro adds something unique to his repertoire), but, in the end, I didn’t care what happened to any of them.
Liev Schreiber, as the over-protective Hasidic neighbourhood watchman who’s quietly pined for Avigal since childhood, is too brusque to engender any sympathy, and though he brings about a potentially brilliant ending, it unfortunately just sits there on the screen.
The plot, too, is a good one, especially as we’re looking at the Hasidic community without making it the butt of a joke or the subject of an eerie wrongdoing. Turturro normalises it, adding an exotic, however wholesome, flavour to the script. I think the problem with this film is that it Is not funny enough to be a romantic comedy or a sophisticated comedy, yet it seems to cling to the idea that it was a comedy.
Such a fine cast, such an interesting director, such an untapped backdrop and yet it was all wasted on an ultimately boring film. Apologies to my friend; I owe you a glass of wine.
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Fading Gigolo
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