REVIEW: Fading Gigolo (2014)

Fading Gigolo is a film in which a soon to be impoverished man, Murray (Woody Allen), suggests to his friend Fioravante (John Turturro) that he become a gigolo, since Murray has already found some clients willing to use such services (Sharon Stone and Sofía Vergara). Fading Gigolo is not even nearly believable, but it is clear that this is not some kind of ballsy defiance of story-centric American cinema though less clear whether it is extreme narcissism or just simply unfocussed, unsure filmmaking.

There is also a storyline involving Fioravante’s burgeoning love affair with the widow of a Hassidic Rabbi, Avigal (Vanessa Paradis, playing the widow, not the rabbi). Fioravante brings Avigal out of her shell, but their relationship becomes complicated when Dovi (Liev Schreiber), who works for Shomrim, a civilian neighbourhood watch group, and who himself loves Avigal, begins to investigate Fioravante.

Fading Gigolo suggests first of all that Sharon Stone and Sofía Vergara would need to pay for sex. Then it suggests that they would willingly pay rather a large sum for sex with John Turturro – which is more odd since Turturro wrote it. This wasn’t such a problem since other films require a much greater stretching of one’s sense of disbelief – Spiderman, for instance. This isn’t a particularly overwhelming problem and it is easy to ignore if one decides not to be bothered by it. Indeed, this degree of male wish fulfilment is something of a staple in American comedies anyway, as Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and, even, Woody Allen films show.

The real problem with the film as far as its storyline is concerned is that it doesn’t seem planned in any way. In the opening moments, characters are introduced badly – as if Turturro’s main concern was avoiding bad exposition. Two characters (presumably Avigal’s children) are introduced without any context whatsoever – they don’t even seem to be in the same room as the action of the previous scene and they say nothing that suggests who they are or what their connection is with the rest of the film. Indeed, it takes a long time for Avigal’s role in the film to become clear and even then it seems unsure. Avigal visits Fioravante, presumably to use his services since Murray has set up the meeting, but all of a sudden it turns out she is only there for a massage, which Fioravante seems to have been expecting and is also fully capable of providing. Soon after they are in love. But it doesn’t seem to make any sense and it certainly doesn’t bare any relation to the whole ‘Fioravante as gigolo’ storyline. On top of that, Dovi never properly investigates Fioravante and he never finds out that he is a gigolo and neither does Avigal, so it all seems to go nowhere. Instead, Murray is investigated, arrested and tried but by then Turturro has introduced a whole new character (played by Bob Balaban) to sort everything out. Then Avigal declares her love for Dovi, without any prior indication that she even liked him and despite all of his rather unsavoury actions. Fading Gigolo feels like it never had more than one draft, the result of a writing exercise in which two outlandish and incompatible storylines are given and the writer has to make do as well as he might – one used, presumably, to teach them that there are limits to their abilities, a lesson John Turturro may not have appreciated.

All of that said however, Fading Gigolo is a comedy and since when did comedies have to make sense. Airplane and Monty Python and the Holy Grail certainly don’t. But both of those films are funny and Fading Gigolo isn’t – not once. The primary focus (initially at least) of the film is on the comedy between Fioravante and Murray, which is good but a little too much like a cheap Woody Allen imitation than the real thing. Casting Woody Allen here is a coup, but it doesn’t really work in the film’s favour since it only invites comparison to films that are much better. There is a secondary focus on Fioravante’s squeamishness about being a gigolo, although this is dropped almost immediately during his first encounter with Sharon Stone’s Dr Parker. All of a sudden, Fioravante is surprisingly good at being value for money. In fact, he’s suddenly an expert – hardly a fading gigolo at all. Then, Turturro decides that Fading Gigolo is a romantic film after all and he drops these scenes for a New York-advertising, sensual kind of filmmaking that is at odds with all of what has come before. The aforementioned massage scene goes on for much, much longer than it really needs to. And just as before Fioravante had suddenly become an expert gigolo, now he just as suddenly becomes an expert masseuse and an expert cook – neither skill established earlier in the film. It is hard not to wonder if the whole thing isn’t just some kind of vanity project from John Turturro, who just wanted to make a film in which he starred as a hyper-capable, incredibly knowledgeable and extremely cultured romantic lead, who gets to have all sorts of love scenes with a variety of attractive actresses.

Fading Gigolo doesn’t make much sense and it is laughably narcissistic in a way that could be forgiven if it wasn’t so unashamedly so. But its major crime is that it isn’t funny when it really could have been. It is a film of wasted potential, with an awkward, lazy tone and no fully developed characters.

REVIEW: Café de Flore (2012)

Café de Flore is the new film by Jean-Marc Vallée, which offers two alternating narratives about the nature of love, set four decades apart yet intrinsically linked. Combining a choppy, hand-held aesthetic and a trendy playlist with a dewy-eyed romanticism, the film seems to want to rehabilitate love as an important theme for modern cinema.

In the 1960s, we meet Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis), who has given birth to a child with Downs syndrome, Laurent (played by Marin Gerrier). Her refusal to abandon her child has left her in semi-destitution but her love for her son does not wane. In the present day, in Montreal, Antoine (Kevin Parent), a successful DJ, has left his wife Carole (Hélène Florent) and their two teenage daughters for Rose (Evelyne Brochu), a significantly younger woman. Carole finds it exceedingly difficult to let go, unknowingly paralleling Jacqueline’s own difficulties when Laurent meets a girl at school…

Café de Flore is a film that is deeply enamoured with music and is littered with rather lyrical sequences in which the music takes precedence over dialogue and the film moves between fast and slow motion depending on the music’s tempo. At times, it feels very much like a music video and it can be a little difficult to consider the characters as little more than the ciphers that are usually seen on music channels. The film is very choppy, with Vallée rarely allowing the scenes to develop beyond their rudimentary parts and often key scenes may pass by with little fanfare, determined instead to segue into more technically orientated sequences. It is never allowed to breathe in the way of a great Woody Allen or John Cassavetes film, despite ultimately being that sort of film, concerned as it is fundamentally with love and relationships. After all, it is a somewhat philosophical work, or at least pretends to be, Vallée’s preoccupation with music often getting in the way of the big questions that the film asks, resulting in some rather facile and frustratingly preposterous answers.

Your enjoyment of Café de Flore will probably rely on a positive answer or, at the very least, a shrugging sympathy towards the positive to the following questions: Do you believe in soul mates? Do you believe in reincarnation? Are you a spiritual person? Do you believe in mysticism? How about mediums? And the tough one: Do you believe in true love? If, like me, all of your answers lean towards the negative, Café de Flore is probably not for you. The film is thoroughly unconvincing as a passionate argument for the existence of these things and when it becoming clear, in the climax, just what the complex multi-narrative storyline essentially boils down to, it can be difficult to avoid the horrible feeling that you have walked into the wrong self-help meeting.

To accentuate the positive, Café de Flore is an ambitious work that does attempt to look at some of the big questions about life and love. The film is not without its more successful moments, such as good performances all round, but particularly from Paradis and Gerrier, though their storyline does descend into the trapping of a TV movie, falling prey to the film’s destructive grand design. The rough-hewn, not entirely conventional aesthetic does have its compensations and the film can say a lot without dialogue, which has become quite a rare skill. The film is very much like some of the work of Terence Malick though, unfortunately, it is more like The Tree of Life, another film that was often intellectually stultifying whilst also being visually fascinating, than, say, Badlands or The Thin Red Line. The film is also not without its nice, even evocative, touches, such as when Carole looks at Antoine but sees the younger Antoine whom she fell in love with all those years ago. Similarly, the film is hampered by many eye-rolling moments, particularly when the Beefeater spectre makes an appearance or when the film hints at the links between the two stories, clunky moments that are irritating even before the reasons behind them become wholly apparent.

What we are left with then is a film that is initially intriguing and one that is often open to interpretation and invention, but which reveals itself to be ultimately shallow and unconvincing. It becomes a film that is difficult to sympathise with, especially if you are not likely to be taken by what it is trying to say. It is a passable film let down by an ending that not only concludes the film on a bum note, but one that actively disrupts any of the good faith you may have had in the film before then. When Carole apologizes to Antoine and their problems are speedily solved at the film’s climax, the film takes a slightly sexist turn, wherein Carole suddenly has to apologize for things that she has no possible responsibility for. The film comes together around the idea that maternal and romantic love are the same, as if it is suggesting that all women are only either mothers or girlfriends. Equally, the film seems designed solely to empathize with Antoine’s position, which is especially problematic as Antoine is really rather unlikeable. Also, the film presents itself as an examination of the many forms of love, though the types of love that it looks at are solely familial and heterosexual. All of these problems culminate with the impression that where the film needed to be profound and understanding, it was merely meaningless and tactless.

Café de Flore is formally interesting and narratively challenging, though both speak more of the director’s artistic pretensions than his abilities. Though it is ambitious and its conclusions about love are nothing if not original, it is the kind of film that is just too easy to dismiss as so much claptrap.