Conversation with John Turturro and Na’ama Keha will follow.
This film is presented by the American Sephardi Federation as part of the New York Sephardic Film Festival. Admission: $ 20. Buy Tickets. In collaboration with Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò.
Italian American sensitive Fioravante runs a flower shop and occasionally works at Murray’s soon-to-close bookstore. As the two struggle to make ends meet with flowers and books, Murray suggests that Fioravante becomes a professional gigolo and he will be his manager. Love, as Murray knows well, is sought for all sorts of reasons. He sets up Fioravante with Esti, a chassidic widow who captures his heart. After shedding his gigolo garments, Fioravante disguises himself as a Sephardic Jew. But who is he truly?
Fading Gigolo’s exploration of love in relation to preset and crystallized norms, identities, and values recalls a classic genre of the premodern Arabic tradition of the “impostor,” the “trickster poet” who forces his interlocutors to deconstruct and reconsider their most basic societal assumptions. This tradition going back to the Arabic maqamah, is the model of a substantial line of modern satire which, in Europe’s early modern era is usually made to begin with Boccaccio’s Decameron. Hebrew writers had already developed their own version of the maqamah and the imposture tale, in Bagdad, Provence and all the way to the Italian peninsula with Dante’s contemporary, Immanuel of Rome.
