The Michigan Daily-Wednesday, April 9, 1980-Page 5 'AMERICAN GIGOLO' Schrader turns a cheap trick BY CHRISTOPHER POTTER I went to Paul Schrader's American Gigolo for the second time last week, hoping to discover some previously un- perceived element in this strange film that would jostle my curiosity, that would somehow justify the film's generally good reviews and its thus far highly profitable box office. There's no director I'd be more willing to give a second chance: In suc- cess or failure, Schrader seems to me the most idiosyncratic, original American filmmaker at work today, an artist whose ample share of flops have often proved just as fascinating as his hits. While other current writer- directors wallow in nostalgia or in outer space, Schrader probes the contem- porary American psyche with a singlemindedness that - until now - has been both courageous and in- triguing. SADLY, Schrader is also an artist inmistakably at war with himself. His classroom adulation for the austere, existentialist-tinged cinematic "minimalism" of French director Robert Bresson seems forever at odds with the naturally gregarious, hipster vitality which has throbbed through his work with an audacity which could only be called funky American. It's regrettable that Schrader's tex- tbook inclinations appear for the' moment to have triumphed over his *naturalist spirit. American Gigolo is am emotional-spiritual blank - it is America through the eyes of a European academician. The film is an 'irless, formalistic work, as barren and uninvolving as any effort imaginable by a serious American director. Schrader has seized on a potentially fascinating, rerboren subject - male prostitution - then coldly, systematically drained it of interest. He never burlesques or trivializes his subject - rather, he *lobotomizes it, shrinking his volatile, troubled characters into wraiths of an- droid gray. Concentrate though you may on the film's premise and plot, your mind soon slithers into far fields of consciousness, groping desperately for some sensory alternative to those strange, sterile humanoids emoting hollowly up there on the big screen. Julian Kay (Richard Gere) is a male practitioner of the world's oldest profession, yet he's hardly a poverty class hustler in the high-class hau',ur of the Beverly Hills upper crust, renting his bodily services out to rich, lonely society matrons with beds to share and cash to burn., "I know what you like, pretty lady, I know just what you need," he croons with a suave zeal as he ministers to his clients with the slick assurance of a neon saint. JULIAN PURSUES his amoral trade with a seraphic, almost priggish righteousness - he won't do homosexual tricks, he won't do S & M. He muses with nostalgic pride over his beneficient works: "This woman hadn't had an orgasm in ten years. It took me nearly three hours to get her off - for a while I didn't think I was going to make it." Young women hold no allure for him - "There's no challenge. It has no meaning." When questioned by a police detective, Julian spells out his altruistic credo: Cop: Doesn't it ever bother you, Julian - what you do? Julian: Giving pleasure to women? I'm supposed to feel guilty about that? Cop: But it's not legal. Julian: Some people are above the law. Cop: And how do these people know who they are? Julian: They know. Julian rigidly dichotomizes his work from its monetary benefits - which in- elude a Mercedes, a galaxy of clothing and a chic, cavernous, book-lined apar- tment complete with maid service and dial-a-breakfast. Here Julian basks in monastic isolation, barricading himself from his nightwork life ("Women don't come here," he stbrnly lectures a hopeful, horny female visitor). YET OUR protagonist's neatly com- partmentalized existence rests on perilous underpinnings. His friend Leon, an urbane black pimp whom Julian occasionally works for, sounds the warning: "You walk an awful thin line, Julian. All those three, five-grand tricks - you're gettin' awful cocky. If those bitches ever turn on you - you're through." Sure enough, Julian's tightly con- trolled world begins to unravel. He fin- ds himself covertly framed on a murder rap; simultaneously, he finds true love camera avoids naked flesh like the plague, tilting away or slowly dissolving with a ritual modesty so iron- clad that when the director unexpec- tedly inserts a lengthy, semi-frontal nude shot of Julian lounging against his bedroom window, the scene comes across like an out-take from an entirely different, ribald film. Indeed, though sex is the core of Gigolo's essence, it is rarely even discussed in anything resembling an uren Hutton, a desirable but lonely L Schrader's 'American Gigolo.' erotic mode. In Julian's world, it is strictly business -dollars and cents, kink or straight. Schrader never at- tempts to explore "Nthe arcane psychology behind sex for sale; he could have cast his protagonist as any high-powered executive fighting an in- ner-office coup by his peers and barely disturbed the film's plot and at- mosphere a single iota. Gigolo lacks any hint of spontaneity or energy. Its characters move and speak haltingly, almost painfully, as if and Gigolo's performers, alas, fall well short of Olympus. As Julian, Richard Gore manages the unusual feat of being simultaneously sexy, intelligent and boring. He never for a moment lets you on the inside of Julian's slowly en- veloping panic as his world distin- tegrates. There's no risk in Gere's per- fo'mance, no, sense of something mor- tal at stake; through pleasure and pain, his face and manner remain in a fixed, cast-like synchronization - handsome, haughty, imperturbably glacial. SURPRISINGLY, Lauren Hutton fares better with the thankless part of Michelle. Her intelligent, painstaking attempts to extract a living role out of a total void indicate she may have at last surmounted the model-pretending-to- be-an-actress stigma that has shackled her thespian career. The same cannot be said of ex-jetsetter Nina Van Pallan- dt, whose impersonation of an affluent female pimp solidifies the notion that she belongs anywhere on earth except in front of a movie camera. Among the rest, Hector Elizondo's overdrawn, cliche portrayal of a sleazy cop wins ac- ting honors by default simply because the remainder of the cast stays so som- nambulantly laid back that his perfor- mance is the only one that even vaguely sticks in your memory. Gigolo's visual motif fares little bet- ter than its script. John Bailey's cinematography captures a certain feeling for soulless Southern California glitter, yet he lacks the fire that Michael Chapman's quirky, pulsating camera provided Schrader's Hard Core. Aside from a relentless mania for initiating scenes with slow pans, Bailey lets his lens rest immobile, as paralytically non-judgemental as Schrader remains himself. As American Gigolo makes no judgements, it effectively sells its own artistic soul. It is a shockingly diffident, cringing work from a filmmaker who had scorced us with the dementia of Taxi Driver, the urban gutsiness of Blue Collar, even the cultural schism of the erratic Hard Core. For whatever reasons, Schrader has abruptly aban- doned his protean instincts in favor of a contrived, bookish timidity. And while his conversion may wow the auteurs and pedants, it can only dismay anyone who cherishes film as a fluid, living art. ANN ARBOR CIVIC THEATRE presents: "THE CRUCIBLE" by ARTHUR MILLER of Lydia Mendelssohn April 9-12 CURTAIN 8:00 pm The Ann Arbor flm Coopew e Presents at Aud. A: $1.50 WEDNESDAY. APRIL 9 BLUE COLLAR (Paul Schrader, 1978) 7&a 9-AUD. A Grand Rapids' own Paul Schrader made his directorial debut with this modern- ized, relentlessly fatalistic film noir about three Detroit assembly line workers (RICHARD PRYOR, HARVEY KEITEL, YAPHET KOTTO) who rob the union treasury with ironic results. Captain Beefheart sings the opening song. "The rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genuinely political film. And a damned good one at that."-Newsweek. 35mm. Tomorrow: George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and Edgar G. Ulmer's DETOUR at Nat. Sci. ANN ARBOR Featuring: Traditional Native American dances, dance contests, booths for arts and crafts & food. i t 4 Richard Gere rekindles passions in Lai woman married to a state senator in Pau for the first time in the personage of Michelle (Lauren Hutton), the beautiful, alienated wife of a prominent state senator. Julian's efforts to cope with these two equally traum tic intrusions occupy most of Gigolo's two hours. Under suspicion for killing a client's wife but not yet incarcerated, he becomes a pariah among his former customers; brusquely abandoned by his friends and colleagues, stalked by the police, Julian finds strength and sustenance only in Michelle. Yet even here his inbred hustler's defenses get in the way: "I can't give Vonwany pleasure (in bed), and you can't fool me any more," she accuses. "I care about you," he pleads, "I really do." "That's still not enough," she replies bitterly. AS THINGS go from bad to worse, we find Julian, his cool utterly demolished, casing the city in frantic search of an alibi for the cops. He finally deduces who the real murderer is, semi- accidentally kills him (strangely, this gets him in no additional legal trouble), then is belatedly incarcerated, drained and semi-catatonic, facing a near- certain date with the gas chamber. At this darkest moment, sudden salvation: Michelle tells the authorities Julian was with her the night of the murder (he wasn't), thus saving him even at the presumed cost of her husband's political career. Moved by this ultimate, unsordid act of self- sacrifice, Julian emerges from his or- deal spiritually and biologically reborn: He no longer needs the hustler's life - at last he can accept love as well as give it. Though one would think such soap opera would prove Gigolo's greatest liability, Schrader subjects his charac- ters to such passionless distancing that a little old-fashioned schmaltz would seem an elixir. Throughout, the direc- tor exhibits an almost disdainful disin- clination to draw our interest. HIS PROTAGONISTS remain num- bingly sketchy: We learn nothing of Julian's background, his conflicts, the obscure elements that have made him what he is. ("All my life I've been sear- ching for something," our hero tells us in his most searingly self-confessional moment). Nor do we learn the reason for Michelle's desperate discontent, or what forces would drive her to Juliam in the first place. We learn even less about Julian's nighttime profession. Given its subject, Gigolo exudes an astoundingly sterile, almost chaste nature: Schrader's APRIL 12 & 13. Saturday - 2 p.m. & 8 p.m. Sunday - 2 p.m. I I Huron High School Donations: Adults - $3.00, Students (with I.D.) - $2.00 Children (12 and under) - $ .75 764-5418 or 662-0567 F Public invited! caught 'in a slow-motion treadmill of nihilist inertia. There's little evidence of the ribald wit which has dotted Schrader's previous efforts; Gigolo's people are gilded, prim and forebodingly humorless - drab marionettes jerked about by a dour creator who has either misplaced or pointedly abandoned the concept of passion altogether. It would take acting of Dionysian proportions to bring such a film to life, Do a Tree a Favor: Recycle Your Daily .2 WEDNESDAY, April 9 HOWARD HAWKS' (Tonight, that is) THE BIG SLEEP Screenplay by William Faulkner. Starring of course-BOGART and BACALL- that star couple that sends shivers up and down everyone's spinal area. "It / all depends on.who's in the saddle." A very witty and gritty movie-Sarah Bellum. Thursday: A Jane Fonda Film! CINEMA GUILD 7:00 & 9:05 AT OLD A&D UD $1.50 /Ij Gonzomania Strikes Ann Arbor! THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S OFFICE OF MAJOR EVENTS IS PLEASED TO PRESENT ' . . WANGO-TANGO TOUR'80 With Special Guests ROAD MASTER :. FRIDAY, APRIL18 *o~nn ""- ( RISLER ARENA Ann Arbor _ , ? i tA "'A. I . -,