Word: gigolos
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...AMERICAN GIGOLO sizzles in Paul Schrader's panning camera, exuding the noxious odor of a raw, sandy strip of Canadian bacon. Dripping of fat, California oozes like a wet silkscreen across a blank matte, uninhibited, rubber-spun, Midasized. California as a deathly seducer, California as a golden road to Luke's Body Shop, California as a white and fiery sale for polished, antique organs--Schrader takes no chances. He plays fixed checkers, hopping from red to black, focusing where the sun shines. But American Gigolo dies even as a mere California movie because it doesn't know where...
Richard Gere is the American gigolo, a gorgeous man whose labia-lipped half-smile can turn on a hydrant at 40 paces. A prostitute, a hairy, hunky whore, he slinks from bed to bed, selling orgasms by the bushel. Tanned like a sowhide wallet, he hides behind Annie Hall sunglasses and a wardrobe of pertly collared shirts, thin neckties and sharp jackets, always trim, cut, trained. He steps on the balls of his feet, his hips leading his chest, for single older women who want it. He has trained brains, he knows antiques, he has more than Looking Good...
...GIGOLO could have been an orchestrated rock-teasing paean to American sexuality of barely sublimated desire, bulging jeans and watery 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...
...Schrader's camera is confused, boring in with a point of view, then halting to let the scene develop. It races past a row of Westwood parking meters trying vainly to create tension, and hacks its way through a Gere/Hutton sex sequence. In one nice touch, though, the Gigolo voices have a stupid, vapid sound, a style of speech learned on the Venice boardwalk or a Malibu sundeck. But Schrader couldn't resist a Mozart organ opus as accompaniment for a mellow-dramatic finale...
...over Julian, wants him so bad she shakes in his presence. She follows in the grand tradition of Ali MacGraw in Players, a beautiful older woman who can't read a line without revealing her flawed front teeth or her flawed acting. To be fair, no one in American Gigolo has a decent role because Schrader's script fails so miserably ("You could have forgotten me," whines Julian. "I'd rather die," whispers Michelle...