His manhood stirs rapture in the most experienced and beautiful women. A certain kind of sex appeal. In a three-decades-plus career of more than 70 feature films, including four by the Coen brothers and nine by Spike Lee, the dour-faced Turturro has played crazies and losers, manics and mopers, but not a lot of romantic leads.
So he wrote one for himself — Fioravante, a flower-shop employee turned soulful stud — and directed it. Fading Gigolo , a slow, soft comedy, harbors many internal contradictions that, I want to believe, it is aware of and means to have fun with. Even the title misleads: Fioravante may be aging Turturro is 57 but his sex life is flourishing. Another is the vanity-production aspect. They come in only two varieties: voracious sexpots and demure damsels.
Liev Schreiber, as a suspicious cop on the neighborhood watch, hangs around to catch Avigal on the rebound. Selima and Dr. But he knows what Fading Gigolo should think: that women want to be loved by men. Sexual politics aside, if they ever are, Fading Gigolo has a wistful tone, and a love of outlandish romance played sotto voce , that connect it less to its star than to its costar.
And he plays, more or less, himself. By which I mean he plays the neurotic, sports- and women-obsessed intellectual from so many Woody Allen movies. As his last line, Murray paraphrases the last line of Casablanca , a movie Allen was so obsessed with that he wrote a modern gloss on it in Play It Again, Sam. Maybe Turturro should write the next few Woody Allen films.
The three female roles may not fit any advanced conception of womanhood, but the actresses slip into them snugly and give every indication of enjoying themselves. So to recommend Fading Gigolo would be too grand a gesture. But if the movie shows up at your home, as Fioravante does when visiting his clients, you might invite it in. Contact us at editors time. Millennium Entertainment. By Richard Corliss April 18, Related Stories.
