Gigola

Gigola is a great looking movie with a great looking lead character who spends almost the entire runtime in tailored suits. Sadly, that’s all window dressing for a shallow, aimless movie.

The film starts with lead character George talking to her teacher/lover, Sybil about her plans to go to medical school. Sadly, by the very next scene, these plans have been disregarded following Sybil’s suicide. George instead makes a place for herself in the underground queer scene of 1960’s France. She cuts her hair short and begins dressing in suits. She also takes on the name Gigola and begins working as a sex worker for female clients. Gigola’s main story line in the movie is seeking and failing to achieve acceptance from her mother. Other than her mother, all other characters wander in and out of Gigola’s life. None have major impact on her life or the story.

Pretty much this entire review is going to be me bemoaning the lack of depth in this movie. It’s a real shame because Gigola is an interesting character to structure a movie around. Sadly, the movie doesn’t seem to want her to do much other than look cool in suits. There’s huge potential here for a deep character exploration that the movie disregards. Gigola is little more than a clothes hanger. While she absolutely does that job well, the film feels hollow. I don’t know much more about this protagonist other than she is good at wearing suits.

Because the film lacks depth, it becomes impossible to extricate Gigola’s sex work and criminal aspect from the underground queer scene overall. As soon as Gigola finds this supportive community of gender nonconforming, queer individuals, it also ties into her not only doing sex work but crime. This also ties in to her losing contact with family. The end of the film features Gigola rejecting the bonds of biological family and returning to her found family of other queer people. This would be a much happier ending if it was possible to separate Gigola’s supportive friends from their nightlife where sometimes people get shot and even Gigola grows tired of.

On this note, Gigola has a brief heterosexual interlude near the end of the film. She has a romance with a small-time criminal which is revealed to be a means to an end to get pregnant. She gets pregnant only to please her mother which doesn’t work. Yet these few scenes with her unknowing male sperm donor are much more romantic than anything else in the film. The sex scenes Gigola has with women are always by night and inherently sort of sleazy. With her male lover, they get to kiss by daylight, dance together and most importantly, have a very romantic sex scene. Said scene features romantic music and lighting and Gigola being physically vulnerable in a way she never has been. This is all a bizarre choice given that she dumps the guy as soon as possible so it’s yet another dead end plot.

Much as Gigola celebrates gender nonconformity, the film’s simplicity also does this theme a disservice. Gigola and the other garconnes recreate masculinity, even the toxic elements. The film never really condemns this. Like Pimp, the lead character is someone who struggles with gender norms and takes them out by being dominant and degrading of feminine women. Nothing ever comes of this character trait. She doesn’t learn or grown from it. It ends up feeling like the film itself is shaming femininity and propping up what is essentially toxic masculinity. It just happens to be toxic masculinity performed by a female-identifying person.

The core purpose Gigola is clearly a desire to have a butch lesbian character wear a lot of great suits. And I am totally on board for that as a jumping off point. Where Gigola falters is that it never goes much deeper than this. Lady in nice suits is a great initial plan for a movie. But it’s absolutely not a concept that can sustain a feature film. Gigola fails to take that seed of an idea and grow it into an actual narrative and fully rounded character who also happens to wear really good suits.

Overall rating: 5.4/10

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