Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Theater

Woody Allen’s one-liners can’t save disjointed ‘Fading Gigolo’

With “Fading Gigolo,” writer-director-star John Turturro does a passable imitation of a mediocre Woody Allen sex comedy, and guess who tags along for this would-be romp?

No, Allen doesn’t play the gigolo (“Pretty Woodman”?). He’s a septuagenarian pimp named Murray, a Brooklyn schemer who for no special reason lightly suggests that his mild-mannered jack-of-all-trades friend, Fioravante (Turturro), should play man-whore to a horny dermatologist (Sharon Stone) who is looking for a little extramarital action. Also, she needs a man for a threesome with a sexy pal (Sofía Vergara), who doesn’t look to me like the sort of woman who needs to pay a guy like John Turturro for sex.

Allen has some funny one-liners that sound as though he improvised them — they’re tonally estranged from the rest of the movie — but Turturro underplays his own character, a sometime florist and bookseller, who at no point seems to register that being a gigolo isn’t just another job. And Vanessa Paradis, who plays a lonely ultra-Orthodox rabbi’s widow, is in a completely different movie from Allen.

Paradis, a beautifully restrained actress, is heartbreaking as the shy and sheltered Avigal, the widow who begins to bloom after a farfetched appointment with the gigolo, who limits himself to massaging her. The two of them gradually develop a deep fondness for each other even as Stone and especially Vergara play their scenes almost totally for comic value.

I couldn’t figure out what these two movies — one larkish but trivial, the other emotionally ambitious — have to do with one another. Neither, apparently, could Turturro.

Had this been an Allen script, the two stories would have caromed off each other in the third act. But as it is, the stories run on nearly parallel tracks, with the main point of crossover being an Orthodox cop (Liev Schreiber) who has a crush on the widow and grows suspicious of Murray’s role in her life. He’s such a thin and seemingly tangential character, though, that his sudden importance at the end feels discordant.

Disappointingly, each of the two stories simply dissolves without a trace, leaving Murray and Fioravante more or less back where they started while we in the audience wonder what the point was.