Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Dim the Lights / Foreign / Film Fading Gigolo rekindles the light of Bertrand Blier
Posted By Ben Sachs on 05.07.14 at 04:15 PM
Blier's movies often revolve around sexual fantasies, though they're less concerned with validating those fantasies (as Hollywood sex comedies often do) than with interrogating the sexual imagination that brings them into being. One of Blier's stylistic signatures is to stage exterior scenes without any extras, suggesting his characters occupy their own private worlds. Heightening the sense of interiority, he often has his protagonists address the camera directly, making spectators into their confidants. (As a director, Blier clearly learned from Alain Resnais, specifically in the use of extended camera movements to evoke the flow of thought.) Mundane experience gives way to absurd complications and back again, typically returning us to the protagonists' solitude. As such, the films can feel pensive and melancholy even when they're making jokes about pedophilia (Handkerchiefs, Beau Pere), infidelity (Too Beautiful for You), or murder (Buffet Froid).
Taken literally, these movies are extremely tasteless. The fantasies under consideration are usually chauvinistic, and Blier's poker-faced direction precludes direct commentary on their chauvinism. (That he presents the fantasies as patently impossible would suggest he doesn't endorse them, yet his work never fails to offend somebody.) Instead he asks viewers to take dreamer and dream as one and sort out the particulars later. In deconstructing the films one arrives at insights into cultural forces that shape the characters' imaginations—prejudices associated with class and regional backgrounds—that aren't apparent on first viewing.
Fading Gigolo invites this sort of reflection. On the one hand, the idea of Sharon Stone (playing a successful dermatologist) paying a 50-ish, working-class florist (Turturro) for sex—after an elderly bookseller played Woody Allen arranges the tryst!—couldn't be more ludicrous. Yet Turturro realizes their encounter patiently, establishing an eerily becalmed atmosphere reminiscent of Blier. Is this the actualization of the Turturro character's fantasy, as he's not only having sex with Sharon Stone but getting paid for it? Or is the fantasy Stone’s? By paying for the encounter, she gets to enjoy being ravished by a rugged, working-class type while having control over the situation—thus experiencing simultaneously pleasures of submission and domination. Bound up in this scenario are some rather serious questions about present-day class and gender divisions in the U.S. Rather than present these issues as self-contained, Turturro (like Blier before him) ponders how they infiltrate our most intimate relationships.
This line of thinking tends to make U.S. audiences uncomfortable, as evidenced by the derisive laughter that Richard Fleischer's Mandingo and Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls—two of the most serious movies ever made about this country—continue to provoke. In that regard, it's less surprising that Blier fell out of favor with U.S. movie culture than that he managed to engage with it for as long as he did.
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