There is a mission about Paul Schrader’s film American Gigolo, just as there is a mission about it’s lead character. Played by Richard Gere, our titular Gigolo has made sex a job and a mission in life, it is the thing he is good at and he has perfected and for as much as Gere is of course an incredibly attractive and charismatic man, Schrader’s film decidley features little actual sex and is repeatedly intentionally un-sexual. As a matter of fact the one ‘sex scene’ we get is a bizarre abstracted collection of almost still photographs between Gere and his love interest Lauren Hutton. 

Credit

For as much as Schrader takes to glamorising Gere’s lifestyle, he also repeatedly takes to deconstructing it and making it all stunningly clinical. This is all in preface of saying that this is one of Schrader’s most stylish and well crafted films, and also frankly one of his most rewatchable. No matter how dark, disturbing and psychological the film gets, always bolstered by a melancholy, the film is a lot of fun to dive back into and return to the world of Gere’s lead figure. Gere is perfect here and is just the right collection of boundless charisma, sex appeal and passion, all driven by a drive to satisfy. Where does this lead our character? Into a noir plot where he has been duped into becoming the frame for a horrid murder. Gere is perfect here, but for a long time the film was going to star John Travolta, who accounts vary on why he left, but it seemed according to Schrader he grew uncomfortable with some of the ambiguity in the film regarding the lead character’s bisexuality. Prior to his directorial debut, Paul Schrader of course made his name with his seminal screenplay Taxi Driver. His collaboration with Scorsese being one of the core collaborations of not just 70s film-making, but also 80s and 90s. However for as much as I see Schrader as this legendary screenwriter, he is too to me as much a seminal director as he is an author. Schrader’s directorial works throughout the years have ranged from the tremendously successful to the terrible, as with most directors, however the grit and promise of his script for Taxi Driver, has always been startlingly present at all times onward. Schrader may be one of the most unspoken legends of writing and directing of that era in film. 

By todays’ standards of course all of the glimpses at our lead possibly being part of the early 80’s gay scene are very tame, but at the time it was incredibly provocative material, especially in a way as it actually has very little to do with the plot itself, it’s merely another factor in the world of this character that we live with over the course of Schrader’s run-time. All the while there is this underworld aspect to the film that can’t be ignored, aswell as the nature of discretion about the events that occur, a key thing to note on re-watches is the repeated use of whispering in the film’s soundscape. Over and over again scenes will play out with whole conversations being whispered by off-screen characters to further bring us into the mind of Gere as everywhere he goes someone is most likely commenting on his nature. The whole film rides this fine and almost invisible line between decadence and affluence and grime and truth, balancing the true darkness of the world of sex work and the façade of its glamour, along with the matter of fact workman aspects of it for those who have it quite simply as their daily job. Everything on screen works together to bring this dichotomy to the forefront of the frame, the sumptuous photography of L.A by John Bailey, the editing of Richard Halsey. The biggest assets to the films effervescent style of course however being the work of the two Giorgio’s who had an incredible involvement in the final product; Armani and Morodor. The costuming by Armani is of course sublime and the way in which the supreme movie stardom of Gere pulls off it all is the sort of thing that movie stars are made off and Schrader knows so very well how to deploy Gere’s talents. Pair this with the pulsating sensational score of Moroder and the film can’t help but drip off a world one longs to enter and be a part off, even if Schrader relishes in presenting the darkness of the world in tandem with the glamour. Moroder too throughout also deconstructs and incorporates the film’s masterpiece featured song Call Me by Blondie, a song so incredibly great that it goes without saying the impact the blasting of it over the initial montage of Gere going about L.A has on an audience member. It’s an extremely powerful and pulsating opening that rockets us into the world we are about to stay in for some time. Which makes the ending of the film, a protracted and desperately slow sequence of short scenes broken up by full fades to black, feel even more like a far-cry from where we began. It’s a film that by the end we realise was something else entirely and it’s a masterful character study along the way too. One of Schrader’s most enjoyable character study’s and with Gere, one of his best acted also.

- Thomas Carruthers