American Gigolo (1980)

Paul Schrader's American Gigolo arrives from 1980 with a wardrobe by Armani, a score by Giorgio Moroder, and a protagonist who treats his own body as a line item in a quarterly budget. Julian Kaye, played by Richard Gere with the serene vacancy of a man who has optimized his life into a showroom, services wealthy older women in Los Angeles and pays for it in tailored linen and a Mercedes convertible. The murder plot is almost incidental. Roger Ebert found a winning sadness in it, and he was not wrong. This is a study in loneliness wearing a very good jacket.

The film's social consciousness is present but faint, the sort of thing detected only by holding it up to a strong light. Héctor Elizondo and Bill Duke appear in supporting roles and are permitted to simply exist, which was ordinary practice in 1980 and reads today as an absence of agenda. Gere has said he took the part partly because of the script's gay undercurrent, and Julian's flat refusal of same-sex assignments gives the character a defensive edge. That is atmosphere, not advocacy. The camera belongs to Julian throughout. Women arrive as clients, or as Michelle, the senator's wife who dismantles her marriage to supply him an alibi, and no argument is mounted on their behalf.

Elsewhere the ledger is nearly empty. The film has no interest in race as a subject, none in climate, none in neurodivergence, and its famous frontal nudity is a boundary pushed, not a body embraced. What it does offer is a low hum of contempt for the transactional world Julian inhabits, though Schrader observes the emptiness instead of indicting it. Nobody lectures. The film shows a man's possessions sold off and lets the silence do the work. For a picture that scandalized 1980, it is remarkably unwilling to tell anyone what to think, which is its own modest virtue and, by the standards of the current moment, a small relic.