Sunday Review: Fading Gigolo, Her, & Autumn Sonata

Love therapy

By Geoffrey Dean

Three films that I chose randomly at the local library for home viewing turned out to have several things in common. Each was written by its director, each features a small nucleus of interacting characters, and each treats a different form of what I would call “love therapy.” I’ll discuss them in the order I watched them:

In Fading Gigolo (2013), writer/director John Turturro plays Fioravante, who allows himself to be pimped by his friend Murray, a failed bookseller played by Woody Allen. As a reluctant newcomer to the pay-me-for-sex trade, Fioravante reveals an array of relevant skills. Not only is he good in the sack, he is a quiet connoisseur of beauty (as his decorative plant-trimming also demonstrates), he can ballroom-dance, he can cook, and he can give massages. Letting others do most of the talking, he proves himself a consummate love therapist, instinctively finding the right romantic approach, keeping or bringing friends together, and transcending economic and cultural gaps, especially between conservative and liberal Jewish groups in New York City. After falling in love with a conservative rabbi’s widow while curing her of certain culturally mandated inhibitions, only to relinquish her to an equally reticent suitor from her own clan, the question of Fioravante’s own ethnicity is finally posed, with some suspicion – “You’re not really Jewish, are you?” Fioravante’s characteristically laconic response shows that he is just as good at keeping the peace as he is at stoically minimizing or withholding his own needs. “I’m not sure,” he says, offering one of his slightly asymmetrical almost-smiles, one of the “faded” visual leitmotifs of Fading Gigolo.

In Her (2013, written and directed by Spike Jonze), Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, whose moustached face is the recurring image as he develops a deeply meaningful romantic relationship with a female operating system named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Samantha’s seemingly uncanny sensitivity to Theodore’s needs mirrors his own talent for expressing the feelings of the people whose identities he temporarily assumes when he is hired to write handwritten, emotionally-charged personal letters for them. It is their shared emotional empathy with others, combined with a seemingly unlimited mandate to invade the private space of other people (with their permission, but it’s still disturbingly creepy) that makes Theodore and Samantha so “perfect” for each other. Embroiled in divorce proceedings he did not initiate, Theodore finds that Samantha also plays an unexpected therapeutic role for him. Her raises an array of related moral questions and portrays this hypothetical type of OS as more morally aware and concerned than the humans (including Amy Adams’s character Amy) who are finding it so easy to develop complex and satisfying relationships with the OS’s. Samantha and Theodore openly profess their love for each other, but both have trouble dealing with the implications of Samantha’s being able to love another 600+ humans at the same time. Samantha’s response is also recognizably “human” – she seeks therapy, joining a help group of OS’s that are having the same issues!

The form of love therapy in Autumn Sonata (1978, written and directed by Igmar Bergman) is the “tough love” of the guilt trip. Eva (Liv Ullmann), an emotionally damaged daughter, unleashes a night-long tirade on her mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), a concert pianist who has come to visit for the first time in many years. While Charlotte’s chronic neglect of her children is clearly in evidence, most obviously in the presence of her bed-ridden younger daughter Helena, Ingrid Bergman’s compelling performance (and perhaps my own inside knowledge of the sacrifices musicians have to make) had me siding with Charlotte throughout the movie. Eva accuses her mother of play-acting, yet it is Eva who pretends to understand, and “translates” for their mother, what Helena is unable to say, and it is Charlotte’s very real distress that we see as she chain smokes alone in her room in the next scene. For me one of the most telling scenes is where Eva plays a Chopin prelude for Charlotte and basically forces her mother to critique her performance. Again, Eva initiates the theater, but during her performance we see a multitude of emotions flitting across Charlotte’s unobserved (except by the viewer) face as it subtly changes expression. The essayist in the DVD edition, which also includes a 3½ hour (!) documentary on the movie that I have vowed to watch someday, tells us that director Bergman was not entirely satisfied with actress Bergman’s interpretation of Charlotte, finding her facial expressions overly studied and her approach too determined to mitigate Charlotte's motherly sins. In any case, Autumn Sonata is the most incredibly intense psychological drama I’ve ever seen, and it certainly merits much more space in this modest review than I can give it!

It was a richly rewarding experience to watch this trio of love-therapy movies. I realized only in retrospect what a compelling grouping they make, so I would be very curious how someone with advance notice of their “compatibility” interprets them!

Copyright © 2014 by Geoffrey Dean