- Vanessa Paradis and John Turturro in Fading Gigolo
One thing I’ve noticed about the response to John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo, which ends its run at the Landmark Century tomorrow, is that people who don’t like it really don’t like it. The anti-Gigolo crowd seem downright appalled by the film’s sentimental view of prostitution, and I’ve heard at least one viewer decry as chauvinistic fantasy the premise of rich and beautiful women paying Turturro’s middle-aged shlemazel for sex. I really can’t argue with someone taking offense with Gigolo for either reason—the film trades in sensitive subject matter, and not in the most sensitive fashion. What seems to push viewers over the edge, though, is the film’s brazen silliness—the casting of Woody Allen and R&B singer Jill Scott as a married couple and French model-actress Vanessa Paradis as a Hasidic widow, the incongruous Borscht Belt-style humor that enters into the sexually frank dialogue. I regard these elements as an expression of Turturro’s oddball humor, but detractors see only ineptitude, if not a childish misunderstanding of how the world works.
