For a film about prostitution, writer/director John Turturro’s latest sure is a touching, warm-hearted, good-natured film that earns its emotional and comedic beats. Fading Gigolo, in which the director stars himself as single and middle-aged Fioravante, a flower store worker turned private escort, has a palpable heartbeat to it, and becomes a film that one can intimately connect with.
What we have then, is an adult comedy about the woes of sex and love and death at middle age, through the story of a personal bedder. Turturro’s restraint and subtlety in his character make Fioravante, seen at the beginning of the film defeatedly closing his bookstore and in search of cash, a man to instantly sympathize with. Which helps, because it’s practically the next scene when Fioravante is proposed to become nightly company for an entire sub-culture of romantically interested middle-aged women by his old friend, Murray, played by Woody Allen. With that information alone you can probably already guess what that back and forth buddy pal dynamic would be, and why it makes the premise funnier, when Woody Allen the comedian is on hand to orchestrate the pimping business (whether that is true for Woody Allen the person, I’m not sure).
Fading Gigolo is an emotionally warm and comedically smart film that would certainly please fans of adult-skewing romantic comedies.
Woody as Murray is a joy to watch in his return to the big screen, a more rare event in which he acts in another director’s film as seen here. And if you get the feeling that the whole show might even start to feel like it could be of Allen’s own more serious adult comedies, you wouldn’t be half-wrong, as Allen offered Turturro early script notes. In fact, Turturro’s original vision was that the film play as a broader, more bawdy comedy. But when Woody Allen heard of the story from their shared barber, he was brought onboard, offering “brutal notes,” which gives the film an entirely new, yet much more romantically charged and perhaps more honest DNA.
Director of photography Marco Pontecorvo also shoots Gigolo beautifully, casting a warm spell over the red tree’d New York neighborhoods. This romantic charge dresses up the whole event and makes for a rich place for the characters to explore their existential crises’ of human existence in. In all actuality, the themes that are handled and explored here stem from very real, very grounded and honest, life experiences. Fioravante’s navigation through the film introduces us to characters seeking love and connection in middle age, including his first client, married but neglected Dr. Parker (Sharon Stone), the sexy bombshell Selima (Sofía Vergara) and Avigal (a wonderful Vanessa Paradis), a lonely single Hasidic spouse, of whom, Fioravante develops a romantic interest for.
Fading Gigolo is an emotionally warm and comedically smart film that would certainly please fans of adult-skewing romantic comedies. Turturro’s coloring and crafting of sophistication are a welcomed treat that could even offer you a little more than entertainment.
