Fading Gigolo

Fading Gigolo is a funny, touching parable about loneliness and our need to connect. It seems to grow out of Tennessee Williams’ great line, “We’re all born into solitary confinement within our own skins.” That skin, our flesh, becomes the medium for us to connect to another, whatever the terms. Such urgent communion precludes a reflex moral judgment.

There’s a backstory. Murray (Woody Allen) met young Floravante (director John Turturro) when the lad broke into the third-generation rare book store to rob him.  Instead of having him packed off to reform school Murray befriended the fatherless kid and guided him into a mature, sensitive manhood. 

Now times are tough. In the movie as in our Republican-paralyzed economy. Murray has to close his bookstore because rare book buyers are rarer than rare books. How can he support the black woman and children he's living with? Floravente works part-time in a florists, where he makes delicate arrangements, tending his blossoms carefully so as not to bruise or break them. 
     Murray’s dermatologist (Sharon Stone), in her need for a beauty and connection beneath the perfect skin and beyond her hubby Claude’s resources, gives Murray an idea for a new career for both men. He will arrange a gigolo for her.

So Floravante tends to wealthy and needy women with the sensitivity and care he gives fragile flowers. (Writer Turturro eschews any pun on bloomers in this film — a good thing.) As pimp Murray will recommend and sell time with an imaginative visit to an imagined relationship, the fiction reading experience is made flesh. Murray adopts the trade name Danny Bongo — apt for drumming up business. Because he will be serving as the women’s guide, Floravante becomes Virgil, which seems close to virgin but is closer to Dante’s Inferno.

Floravante is a bit of a poet himself. “The rose comes before the thorn; the thorn comes before the rose.” i.e., Life teems in ambivalence. A brilliant jazz score, based on Gene Ammons, amplifies the soulfulness. So, too, scenes where silences stretch out so long we have nothing to focus on but the characters’ inner being.

Our glimpses of Floravante’s clientele suggest the wide spectrum of women who suffer from loneliness and disregard. Some are old, some large, some as lovely as Sharon Stone and her buoyant BF Sofia Vergara, who nurse the desire for a threesome. The tyro gigolo Floravente treats them all with gentleness, respect and sexual effectiveness. Not the conventional pretty boy, he wins them with understanding. He actually listens for signs of their needs. Presumably a man doesn’t have to be a gigolo to treat women with such generosity and respect — but it helps. Murray talks up his clients with a clumsy parody of Floravante’s care.

But this gigolo is Fading. What threatens to drive the Italian hero out of his generous profession is his encounter with an orthodox Jewish sect. Nothing like an orthodox religion, any orthodox religion, to drive people apart and away from their life source. 

The rabbi’s widow Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) has had six children but has never been touched. Instead of the Immaculate this sect has the Peremptory Conception. Her longtime admirer, the community security officer Dovi (Liev Schreiber, armed with squadcar, badge, payess and tzitzis) is alarmed at her sudden happiness. He drags Murray off to a tribal judges hearing.

The film’s highpoint is the discreet development of the feeling between Avigal and Floravante. It begins on a radical note — from a man she can’t shake hands with, a bare back rub. That addresses her sense of loneliness so directly she bursts into tears. Their relationship teeters between the gigolo’s customized service and the strictures of her sect. His climactic baring is not her dress but her wig. Floravante realizes he is in love with her when he fails to perform in that long-planned threesome. He can’t manage a trois because he can no longer manage seul. The Italian florist/gigolo needs his ultra orthodox rebbetzin.

Of course, it cannot to be. Awakened to life by her gigolo, Avigal is ready to resume life in her own world. She accepts Dovi and with him comes to bid farewell to her emancipating, soul-discovering gigolo. This film renders “Just a Gigolo” obsolete.

And the heartbroken Floravante? He announces his plan to go away. The gigolo won’t ho’ mo’. But then this beauty comes into the coffee shop and Murray starts flirting and gets his card to her so who knows? People have needs that must find providers.The flesh will trump the prohibitors.