Word: schrader
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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...
Truth was not Schrader's goal, however. He tried to create a tense, sexual rhythm of color and sound, the lust of America pressed to a video disk. But he directs with the subtlety of Bo Derek disrobed, surrounding Julian with red-colored objects and shadowy bars, trapping him in a bloody, infernally chic hell...
...Schrader paces his film like a march through a rain forest, pausing every few yards to admire the "architecture" of Southern California. Each sequence begins with unnecessary shots of buildings, deck chairs and doorways, and enough driving to explain last summer's gas shortage. The movement of 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...
...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...
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...