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 β Fioravante, a flower-shop employee turned soulful stud β 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.
