John Turturro (2013)

John Turturro relies very heavily here on audience affection for Woody Allen, who co-stars with him and who, according to Mark Kermode, advised on Turturro’s screenplay during its development.  This reliance no doubt reflects Turturro’s own positive feelings about Allen – admiration, and gratitude that he agreed to do Fading Gigolo.  Cameos aside, Allen’s appeared, over the nearly fifty years since his screen debut in Clive Donner’s What’s New Pussycat?, in only a handful of films directed by someone other than himself.  To say that Turturro must have written the role of Murray with Woody Allen in mind is putting it mildly – it could hardly have been played by anyone else.  Murray is as much spirit of place as a character, the place is New York City, and the wry affection and sense of nostalgia Murray feels for New York are integral to the enduring Woody Allen persona.  (It will continue to endure however many more films he makes that are set elsewhere.)  Murray runs a second-hand bookstore, a family business going back a couple of generations but no longer viable.  He lives in Brooklyn, where the Hasidic Shomrim are a worrying presence[1] but where Murray, who lives with an African-American family, teaches Jewish and black kids to play baseball together.  Murray’s prime function in the plot of Fading Gigolo, however, is to persuade his fiftyish friend Fioravante (Turturro) to try and earn some money for them both – as a prostitute, with Murray as his pimp.  The idea first occurs to Murray after an appointment with his dermatologist (Sharon Stone), when she mentions that she and a woman friend fancy the idea of a ménage à trois and need a suitable man.

Fading Gigolo hasn’t been well received and the writer-director-lead has had bad press for what some critics have dismissed as a vanity project:  Mark Kermode, while finding the film mildly entertaining, couldn’t suspend disbelief in the premise that Sharon Stone would pay to have sex with John Turturro.   I found this easier to believe than in Sharon Stone as a dermatologist, and the movie as a whole largely inoffensive, but the script is weak.  There aren’t enough clients or, at least, enough entertaining encounters between Fioravante and the women he services.  The threesome initiative (Sofía Vergara is the other woman in it) takes ages to happen.  Or not happen:  by the time they all get together, Fioravante has fallen in love with a sensitive Hasidic widow and has lost the heart to go through with professional sex.  The old couple sitting in front of us at Curzon Richmond walked out after half an hour.  At first, I assumed they were disgusted by the story although – with the title Fading Gigolo (odd since Fioravante has never been a gigolo before) and a poster strapline ‘The oldest profession just got older’ – there wasn’t much scope for misunderstanding in the way that films like The Killing of Sister George and Midnight Cowboy were once alleged to be misunderstood.  But maybe the couple walked because they were impatient for more on-screen sex than is actually supplied.

I think of John Turturro as an over-actor; he’s continuously quiet here, and likeable, but it remains a mystery how Fioravante gets persuaded in the first place to be a male hooker.  There are nice performances from Vanessa Paradis as the widow and Liev Schreiber as the Shomrim man who carries a torch for her.  There’s an implication, though, that being a Hasidic Jew is OK only if you’re Vanessa Paradis under the required wig or Liev Schreiber under the skullcap and sideburns:  the Rabbinic court that Murray gets hauled in front of is treated less kindly.  This is the fifth feature John Turturro has directed but he tends to move the camera rather obviously – the effect is often to over-emphasise gag lines.  That said, it was one of the daftest jokes that caused my only audible laugh, when Murray mishears ‘acidic’ for ‘Hasidic’, and at least Woody Allen’s timing seems in better shape under Turturro’s direction than it was in To Rome with Love.  With Bob Balaban as Murray’s lawyer, Tonya Pinkins as the mother of the family with whom Murray lives, and the beautiful Aurelie Claudel:  she appears briefly in the film’s final scene and causes Fioravante, who’s decided by this point to quit New York, to think again.

27 May 2014

[1]  Wikipedia defines Shomrim as follows:  ‘Shorim (Hebrew: שומרים‎, lit. “watchers” or “guards”) are organizations of volunteer Jewish civilian patrols which have been set up in Hasidic and Haredi neighborhoods in the United States and England to combat burglary, vandalism, mugging, assault, domestic violence, nuisance crimes, and antisemitic attacks …’