Paul Schrader
American Gigolo

The '70s have ended, along with the era of protests, post-Watergate paranoia (of Coppola memory), Vietnam, and the traumas that followed the long and devastating conflict, perfectly immortalized forever in the definitive masterpiece that is The Deer Hunter and that heartrending American anthem that closed Cimino's epochal film.

In my personal view, no one represented the aesthetics and cinema of the American '80s like De Palma, Friedkin, Mann, and Paul Schrader. Surely, the most pedantic might argue that the aforementioned represented more the Californian America; but on the other hand, Los Angeles, Hollywood, California in general, the land of milk and honey, have always been at the center of the American cinematic imagination more than deep and rural America, at the center of smaller independent productions.

American Gigolo, along with Body Double, To Live and Die in L.A. rather than Manhunter, is one of those films that shaped the '80s at an iconic level and in terms of visual and conceptual mythology.

That imagination and reality are not the same thing is another matter, but who cares.

Schrader, like the others mentioned, has always, however, rooted his intellectual foundations in various European cultural influences, which made him one of the greatest authors of his generation, first as an extraordinary screenwriter, then (also) as a director. Taxi Driver, Yakuza (Pollack's masterpiece), Obsession (among the best meta-linguistic Hitchcockian reinterpretations by De Palma) paved the way for the creation of a film like American Gigolo. Just like Dreyer, Bertolucci, Camus, Dostoevsky, Bresson — artists who absolutely transcend their terrains of belonging — laid the groundwork for Schrader's work.

American Gigolo, although seen today is so tied, indeed, to an aesthetic deeply rooted in the atmosphere of a specific historical period, even now, almost forty years later, has lost none of its superb charm and stylistic elegance. The film, which was released a year before the official start of the Reagan era, showcases the dark sides of metropolitan America, made of hidden perversions, meanness, murders, and machinations. In a succession of memorable scenes (the beginning on Call Me, the long take with Gere working out, the erotic scene between the two protagonists, Julian's entrance into the gay club), classy camera movements, anthology nighttime shots.

Up to the finale, which explicitly quotes Bresson (bordering on plagiarism, but Schrader himself has never hidden freely "cribbing" Pickpocket, even while writing some scenes in Taxi Driver where De Niro walked alone through the New York streets). A finale that will be referenced again in Light Sleeper.

Gere, who had only one major film to his credit (Days of Heaven), became more than a star, a true icon, beyond acting abilities.

In its own way, American Gigolo is a cinema classic, to be loved without reservations. Before, a few years later, Schrader would create what I consider one of my favorite films, namely Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. But that's another story.