Fading Gigolo review – wry, middle-aged male fantasy

In this bittersweet (and more than faintly preposterous) New York comedy, writer/director John Turturro casts himself as a ladies man who takes on a late-life career as an escort after bookshop owner Murray (Woody Allen) pimps him out to his glamorous but apparently frustrated dermatologist (Sharon Stone). If you can get beyond the implausibility of Sharon Stone paying John Turturro to join her in a ménage à trois – and, frankly, I couldn't – then there are lightweight pleasures to be had amid the wry, angsty middle-aged male fantasy. Things take a turn for the (meta)physical when the eponymous gentleman caller applies his healing hands to a Hassidic widow (Vanessa Paradis – no, really) to the alarm of her insular community. It's a strange affair to be sure, buoyed by the conversational interaction between Turturro and Allen, weighed down by the egocentricity of its central conceit, but then leavened too somewhat by the charm of its performances and the dappled air of its golden-glow cinematography.