Fading Gigolo    

“Woody Allen at his best” exclaimed the Daily Telegraph “a surprisingly likeable film”. On the strength of this recommendation, I headed off to see ‘Fading Gigolo’ yesterday, some months after its release.

The gigolo of the title, played by John Turturro (who also directed the film), is a florist called Fioravante. His friend, Murray Schwartz (Allen), a failed bookshop owner, hatches a plan to set his pal up as a gigolo, with him acting as pimp. The exchanges between the two as they haggle over who gets what out of the deal were among the funnier moments of the film and there were a few other nice, comic touches, including the kind of one-liners for which Woody Allen is justly famous. I also liked the location (multi-ethnic Brooklyn) and I thought the scenes between Fioravante and Avigal were very tenderly done, a cool jazz soundtrack adding to the sweet atmosphere. I thought Sharon Stone and Sofia Vergara played their parts hilariously well – the contrast between these pampered, bejewelled, lip-glossed women who see sex as a fun way to relax and the plain, black-clad Jewish widow, Avigal, played by Vanessa Paradis (am I the only one to be inordinately preoccupied with the gap in her teeth?!), whose experience of sex we may presume was rather different, was wonderfully farcical.

To cut an already insubstantial story short, Fioravante soon decides being a gigolo is not for him. This was the point at which I thought - naïve as I am - that I might get a nice, cosy ending. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I thought Turturro was ‘releasing the inner Avigal’ so that the two of them could have some sort of happy life together. I wasn’t expecting her to go off with someone else – in this case the local neighbourhood watch officer played by Liev Schreiber, who had long held a candle for her. Hrrumph!

Not only was I disappointed by the weak storyline of this film, but also by what was left unexplained. (Who, for example, was the African American woman in the kitchen? Who did those delightfully winsome children belong to? What was their relationship to Schwartz?) I also have to be honest and say I also left this film feeling slightly grubby. It had a definite voyeuristic feel to it, e.g. the scene where Turturro opens the door to reveal Stone and Vergara canoodling on the bed as they await the arrival of their ‘stud’ – surely the stuff of every man’s fantasy.  A “sweet-natured and gentle film”, as one critic described it, it was not. At times, it was just plain crude and smacked of self-indulgence. For a film apparently aimed at an older audience (film-makers are still trying to ride the wave of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s success), this was all wrong – the predominantly elderly group at my local film club’s afternoon matinee were not at all impressed. They felt it was mucky and (for a film billed as a comedy) not particularly funny. I’m with them!