Word: gering
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Julian (Richard Gere) makes his living in the nicer precincts of Los Angeles by providing sexual services to well-off middle-aged ladies. He is pretty, smartly dressed and inarticulate when any serious subject comes up; yet one can understand what a neglected wife might see in him. His power with women derives not from being aggressively male but from being ingratiatingly sweet. He is good at his work and is sufficiently self-aware to understand that his exceptional talent is ultimately self-defeating: he can give pleasure but never receive it. Indeed, the film's major psychological twist...
...very far beneath the ugly surface of the demimonde. It is clear he is horrified (or at least titillated) by his movie's milieu, but he doesn't make it palpable. In any event, Schrader's development of the frame-up story is mechanically melodramatic, and Gere, essentially a boring actor, doesn't help much either. He just cannot carry a picture, even when his passivity and gentleness well serve some aspects of his character, as they do here...
...hours getting Julian into a tight corner, Schrader cannot bear to leave him there. The picture ends with a cockamamie implication that love will conquer all -even the false, but seemingly airtight, murder rap. Such a conclusion betrays everything the film has so carefully built up -the easily victimized Gere character, the hypocrisy of the chic world he has risen to, the viciousness of the underworld which spawned him and retains its vicious claim...
...eyes, sex sans porn, pulse without flesh, a lean, lacquered look at the demons of the California Dream. Instead, Schrader concocted a laughable montage of silly sequences, an absurd plot and bad lines that reaches climax in a bizarre series of fade-outs that symbolize pauses between pelvic thrusts. Gere, as Julian Kaye, makes it clear that he does only straight, high-class women. He looks more embarrassed than worried when he gets framed for a handcuffs-cum-sex murder that he didn't commit in this kinky-trick movie that John Travolta should have made. Schrader filled his script...
...Richard Gere is a remarkable actor. He proved so in Days of Heaven and he is now lugging rocks to raves in Bent on Broadway. But his gigolo moves in low gear, too serious if Schrader's attempt was satire, too absurd if the attempt was straight-faced. Michelle's Senator-husband summed it up perfectly: "I know a whore when...