Fading Gigolo
Opens Friday at Fifth Avenue
With the multiplex crammed full of monsters and action heroes at present, it comes as a bit of a relief to see a touching little sex comedy tiptoe into theatres.
A touching sex comedy? Well, yes. John Turturro wrote and directed Fading Gigolo, in which he just happens to star as a man with remarkable gifts in the bedroom. The affecting aspect of the tale comes not from his three-way with Sofia Vergara and Sharon Stone, but in his romantic friendship with a Hasidic Jewish character played by Vanessa Paradis.
Paradis, little known on this side of the water for being anything other than the mother of Johnny Depp’s children, plays Avigal, a lonely widow with six children, trapped in the confines of her all-seeing Jewish community. There’s even a community police in charge of neighbourhood patrol. “Sometimes we go beyond,” is the vague and somewhat threatening description by patrol member Dovi (Liev Schreiber).
Fioravante’s decision to become a gigolo late in life is financially motivated, as always, and suggested by his friend Murray (Woody Allen), a rare-bookstore owner about to lose his shop. It’s Murray who sings Fioravante’s praises to a frisky dermatologist (a sensational-looking Stone), thus starting a new venture into the world’s oldest profession. He adopts “Bongo” as his pimp name — and christens his pal “Virgil” — and they’re off.
“Virgil” wins rave reviews from the dermatologist (“You’re top shelf,” she says post-coitus, “you’re hard to reach”) who soon shares the love with her girlfriend (Vergara). Pictures of the pair in come-hither lingerie are already all over the Internet though the actual sex scenes are absent, which only adds to the mystery of what makes Fiorvante so potent.
He’s a bit of an enigma in general, this florist who agrees to sell himself for cash. He only starts to come alive when Murray introduces him to Avigal. The relationship begins with one touch of a massage, too much for a woman who hasn’t been touched in years. A kosher dinner follows, where the filleting of a fish was never so sexy. Avigal doesn’t know his true profession, of course. “This is what you do: you bring magic to the lonely.”
Avigal’s sudden trips out of the neighbourhood raise the curiosity of the neighbourhood watch and of Dovi, who has a crush. Murray is implicated and thrown into a car for questioning by a bearded Hasidic tribunal. “I think you’ve got the wrong guy, I’ve already been circumcised,” he protests.
The film is outrageous, of course, and is happy to meander through the streets of New York City than go nowhere fast. Full of pithy advice (“If the blinds are drawn, you’ve got to pull the shades up”) and themes of loneliness and redemption, Fading Gigolo also succeeds because of the comedy of Allen (who reportedly had heavy input into the finished product), the fragility of Avigal, courtesy of Paradis, and Turturro’s performance, spare, but affecting nonetheless.
