american gigolo

As an actor, Richard Gere amounts to mostly placid planes and surfaces, which has resulted in a largely weightless body of work (with a few choice exceptions) but also made him uniquely suited to portray Julian Kay, the lead character of Paul Schrader’s 1980 dramatic thriller American Gigolo. As the top male escort in Beverly Hills (the word “gigolo” is never actually used in the movie), Julian specializes in giving women pleasure, but it’s clear Schrader is far less interested in the fantasy than the facade. We’re rarely privy to the intimacy of Julian’s craft - the one time we’re allowed to watch him operate in the bedroom, it’s a “rough trick” that turns sour… his purring seductions compromised by the woman’s husband, foppish and bug-eyed, who orders her to be taken from behind then snarls “Now slap the cunt!” 

Schrader has been a relatively vital cinematic voice for the better part of fifty years now, but he’s not exactly known for his subtlety. With the exception of the occasional curveball - such as his deliriously weird remake of Cat People - he’s remained preoccupied unbudgingly on most of the same themes and hang-ups for his entire career. Here he fixates on Julian’s obsessive routine - his Armani threads and collection of fine neckties, his painstaking physical regimen (his body, after all, is literally his stock-in-trade), the way he compulsively dedicates himself 24/7 to the profession, at the expense of any semblance of an interior life or sense of self (it’s no surprise that Bret Easton Ellis has openly admitted what an influence the film was on Patrick Bateman and American Psycho). Schrader has been vocal about how Julian is effectively a product of the same loneliness and alienation as Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, the main difference being that the latter is aggressively nonsexual, whereas the former is the complete opposite.

Two events ultimately conspire to unravel Julian’s carefully cultivated existence. First, he meets Michelle Stratton (Lauren Hutton), the unhappy wife of a prominent California politician, who pursues him out of genuine romantic interest… forcing Julian to grapple with the alien concept of a mutually beneficial relationship with genuine emotional stakes (he’s hardwired to approach sex as purely transactional - he specializes in giving pleasure, but has little frame of reference when it comes to receiving it). And second, he suddenly finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation. The contrived thriller element is forgivable as a necessary means of generating narrative juice… but it proves disappointingly turgid. Julian suspects a frame-up and the notion seems so blindingly obvious it’s hard to believe that a detective as seasoned and savvy as Hector Elizondo’s Joe Sunday doesn’t see straight through the smokescreen. Instead the walls start closing in, but the whiff of conspiracy remains largely one-dimensional. Still, there are visual conceits that pay off robustly… such as when Julian suspects a key piece of evidence has been planted in his apartment and he systematically tears the place apart, the entire scene striped with shadow from the venetian blinds. John Bailey’s cinematography has a heightened, high-gloss appeal; it begins like a sun-kissed magazine spread before tilting into noir-tinted paranoia.​

Schrader recognizes that Julian’s entire persona amounts to sleek contrivance, a diligently maintained fantasy that he buys into every bit as much as the women he services… yet the film seeks to lay bare a character who has precious little to reveal to us. It amounts to stripping the cover from a book full of blank pages… which is both the brilliance and the limitation of Gere’s performance. It’s rather stunning just how unerotic the movie actually is, but then Schrader has always had a loathing, almost seethingly combative relationship to sex. In his particular brand of cinema - encompassing everything from Hardcore to Auto Focus - it’s routinely depicted as a corrosive and corruptive influence… nothing good ever really comes from the act (Cat People basically literalized it as phantasmagorical animal lust). In retrospect, that probably means Schrader, who’s frequently approached moviemaking as a confessional form of self-flagellation, was all wrong for this particular subject matter (why bother to juxtapose fantasy and reality when it all feels so glumly interchangeable?). The film needed a director capable of fusing De Palma’s self-consciously sordid sensuality with Friedkin’s berserker fearlessness. Schrader’s interest in Julian is strictly anthropological. American Gigolo still grazes profound insights concerning male melancholia and isolation, but its titular portrait never feels fully colored in. Like the film’s visual palette, it ultimately settles for hues of muted gray and blue.