American Gigolo is a 1980 film featuring Richard Gere who plays Julian, a male prostitute that is particularly fond with pleasing older woman and happens to be framed for murder after one of the women he slept with is killed the day after he services her. Julian is a very confident character, who is well aware of his own attractiveness. According to Sachin Shrijith, “Julian is a classic loner who leads a sheltered existence that he has so carefully built and he wouldn’t let anyone mess it up. His lifestyle is different from that of other guys in his profession. His residence is neat and spacious with everything carefully arranged; he has good taste in music and art and has got a great collection of records and paintings. Oh, and did I mention his great taste in clothes? Everything he wears was designed by Giorgio Armani and this film was actually responsible for launching the designer’s career”. He is extremely relaxed, and knows how to do his job easily and effectively. Julian constantly acts like he is above the law, and the law is wrong because he is only causing pleasure through his job. He has one rule, and that is that he only sleeps with the same woman once, so they do not get too attached and clingy, but he ends up breaking this rule with Michelle. By the end of the film, Julian seems like a completely different character, as he is very upset and filled with emotion. He is extremely affectionate towards the woman he has fallen for, Michelle, and does not want to spend time without her. His home starts to become lonely, as it used to be his safe place to relax without women. Michelle is another very confident character, as she sees right through Julian’s charm. She understands him on a deeper level than any other woman has before, and she tries to help him prove that he is innocent. Throughout the film, Julian acts as though he is not becoming attached to Michelle, but by the end, we see a complete change in Julian’s character as he confesses his love for her. Once Julian notices that he is being framed for a murder that he did not commit, he checks his house to see if they have placed some evidence to hold against him. He becomes extremely paranoid, and starts frantically searching his home. The music is blank, and we get a view almost like a surveillance camera. This allows us to see what Julian is going through without feeling the emotions that he is feeling. According to American Cinematheque, “Schrader doesn’t allow us to identify with Julian the way we usually do in a Hollywood movie; the character is emotionally detached from everything and everyone around him, and that includes us, the audience. He’s constantly photographed in and around mirrors and other reflective surfaces that present alternate sides of Julian but don’t really tell us anything about him, and I think this sense of remove is another instance of the movie being both artistically satisfying and commercially sound – mainstream audiences probably don’t want too direct an identification with a male prostitute”. In this scene, he completely destroys his home and his belongings, and seems to be a completely different character than the calm, relaxed, lady killer that we met at the beginning of the movie. This is where the action of the movie is shown, as the movie before this has been relatively uneventful. The movie focuses on many simple, repetitive shots. The music is not very prominent throughout the film. The movie showcases a transcendental style of film, where the movie is relatively average and showcases a typical day for the character, while the end of the film is where there is a significant amount of action. The end of the film shows the confession of Julian’s love for Michelle, and a change in the character as a whole. It showcases the majority of the film’s actions into the final scene. This is similar to the movie Pickpocket, as Paul Schrader claimed that is where he adopted many of his ideas from. Sachin Shrijith: https://projectedperspectives.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/american-gigolo-paul-schraders-stylish-tale-of-love-loneliness-and-redemption/ American Cinematheque: http://americancinematheque.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-contradictory-man-paul-schrader-and.html
0 Comments
|
ArchivesCategories |