Directed by: John Turturro.
Written by: John Turturro.
Starring: John Turturro (Fioravante), Woody Allen (Murray), Vanessa Paradis (Avigal), Liev Schreiber (Dovi), Sharon Stone (Dr. Parker), Sofía Vergara (Selima), Bob Balaban (Sol), Loan Chabanol (Loan).
There
are moments in nearly every scene of John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo that I quite
enjoyed. The film is filled with some fine performances, humorous moments, and
moments of surprising tenderness and emotion. The problem for me is that none
of them ever really come together to make a cohesive whole. It’s almost as if
Turturro is making two different movies – a sex comedy about a middle aged,
normal looking man who becomes an unlikely gigolo and a tender romance between
that same man and a widow of a Hasidic Jewish rabbi, who has grown lonely since
her husband’s death. Had he followed one path or another, perhaps he could have
made a very good movie. But because he tried to do both, he ends up doing
justice to neither – and there seems to be a lot of necessary connecting tissue
that isn’t in the movie. The Turturro character himself doesn’t seem to be the
same person in each of the two halves of the film.
Turturro
stars as a man living in New York who needs money. He works part time at a
flower shop, and part time at a used and rare book store run by his best friend
Murray (Woody Allen) – who has had to close up shop. In one of those things
that only happens in the movies, Murray’s dermatologist, Dr. Parker (Sharon
Stone) mentions that she has always wanted to have a ménage a trois with her
best friend Selima (Sofia Vergara) and a man – and is wondering if Murray knows
anyone. He thinks of his friend, Fioravante (Turturro) – and tells him this
could be a good way to make extra money – with Murray, as his pimp, taking a
small percentage of course (a 60-40 split seems fair to him). Parker wants a “test
drive” with him, and it goes well, so Murray starts finding him other clients,
and the money starts rolling in. Then Murray finds an abnormal client – Avigal
(Vanessa Paradis) – the widow of a rabbi in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood in
Brooklyn. She seems lonely – because she is. She has a lot of children, but
hasn’t been touched by a man since her husband died. Murray thinks that Fioravante
could help bring her out of her shell a little bit. What neither of them count
on however is that he would start to have deeper feelings for her than he does
for the rest of the women he “services”.
Parts
of Fading Gigolo work quite well. This is Allen’s best performance in quite
some time – although in part that’s because he has only cast himself in two of
his own movies for the past decade, and those two (Scoop and To Rome with Love)
are among the worst movies he has ever made. I cannot help but wonder if Turturro
let Allen write some of his own dialogue – if not, than Turturro does an
excellent job at mimicking Allen’s writing style as Murray could very easily be
an Allen creation. Turturro’s direction owes a debt to Allen as well – along
with Spike Lee, who Turturro has worked with often – as he lovingly shoots New
York combining the different styles of those two directors. The rest of the
performances are fine as well – Paradis, although she undeniably still sounds
French – is quite good as the shy, quiet woman slowly emerging from her grief
and Stone and Vergara have great fun as a pair of vulgar, rich women lusting
after Turturro. Turturro is fine on a scene by scene basis – but the
performance never really comes together. He’s in full comic mode when paired
with Allen, he’s putting on an act with Stone and Vergara, and he’s tender and
sweet with Paradis. While each of these aspects of his character work in their
individual moments, they never come together – I almost felt like I was
watching different characters played by the same actor.
That pretty much describes the movie as well – that in the individual moments, it works just fine, but when taken as a whole, it doesn’t really work at all. As a writer and director, Turturro needed to find a way to make everything come together, and it never really does. This was a problem with his last film as a writer/director as well – Romance & Cigarettes – but that film had the benefit of being an ambitious, working class musical, full of great performances, that helped plaster over the scripts weak spots. Fading Gigolo never really does that. The film is an amusing diversion, but could have – and should have – been something better.
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