'American Gigolo', the pain of the first penis

• Film nudes (I) 'Ecstasy', Hedy Lamarr and the sting of the first orgasm

In 1980, many discovered thanks to Led Zeppelin drummer

- not Twitter - that it was possible to die by drowning in your own vomit.

In 1980, the failure to free the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran heralded the imminent arrival of a much more conservative world at the hands of Ronald Reagan.

In 1980, the New Hollywood dreamed up by Coppola, Scorsese, and the recently deceased

, was dying for the suicidal exuberance of

's Heaven's Gate .

In 1980,

assassinated John Lennon.

And in 1980, in the midst of the discussion about whether

Half of humanity discovered the true value of the VCR's Pause button (yes, it was called that) because of

There, at the decisive moment, you could see what had never been seen.

Pause.

Or, at least, not in a more or less conventional, more or less commercial film.

We imagined it, but for the first time the proof was visible: in addition to an ass, the actors had a penis.

Pause.

It might seem unfair, as well as ridiculous, to reduce the value of

's third film to a single scene.

But on the other hand, the sequence deserves it.

After a moment of passion composed on the screen as a puzzle of fragments of two intertwined bodies, the elusive, anomalous and perfect beauty of

and the Apollonian rigor of a world-hungry

lived a last act with one of those dialogues existential and pure that the director has always cultivated with such precision (by the way, next month he receives a fair tribute in Venice).

Her: Where are you from?

Him: I don't know.

I'm not from anywhere.

I am from this bed.

Everything worth knowing about me you can learn by making love to me.

Next, he untangles his shaven body from between the sheets, looks out at the world peering through the slats of one of those so-called Venetian blinds and the sun's rays - like surprised blades, as the poet would say - wound the skin of a naked man .

Head on.

No hiding places.

From then until now, there has been no interview in which the interpreter, who by then barely had a couple of outstanding titles despite his 30th birthday

by Richard Brooks, and

by Terrence Malick), has not been forced to recall that scene.

It's all because of the newly discovered Pause button.

"As far as I remember, nothing that happened was in the script.

Everything happened naturally », the man who forever embodied

And the key, precisely, is there.

In Kaye.

Kaye took half a second to become a myth since the screen throws the first image of her behind the wheel of a black Mercedes hurtling down the highway while Debbie Harry's Call Me plays.

The nude thing, let's say, came from excess.

Paul Schrader came from shooting

Gone was his first great and enormous achievement as a screenwriter of the totemic and foundational

by Martin Scorsese.

Once again, the filmmaker insisted on his character, the hallmark of his cinema, in desperate search of redemption.

It doesn't matter that he was an ex-combatant taxi driver from Vietnam, that a father upset by the loss of his daughter in the underworld of porn, that a hustler in love.

All of them are joined by guilt for a wounded past and the urgent need for sacrifice.

As the filmmaker himself theorized in his doctoral thesis on the transcendental cinema of

the camera stops at the daily life of a life without drama to let from there, from the anomaly without narration of day to day, reach to draw the exact profile of a fracture that has to do with love and, in effect, the faith.

Not in vain, American Gigolo can be considered a remake of Bresson's

, and, not in vain, Schrader is essentially a man who believes in each of his doubts.

The novelty was that if before he had worked on the tragic blackness of condemned lives, now his idea is to do it in the light of day.

Kaye is a guy who likes.

She is a guy with taste who speaks five languages ​​and from the fluidity of her manners, she seduces those on one side as well as the other.

Kaye is an androgynous being as liquid as the money he handles and gives it meaning.

Kaye is a man who lives in a no-strings-attached hotel, a symbol of both

80s

and 70s

is the polished metaphor of a time that is crumbling to the sweet rhythm of

The chronicles say that the role was originally intended for John Travolta.

In fact, the one who dances the best left a trace of him in the character both in the movements and in the clothing.

's suits,

cast and laid out on the bed while Smokey Robinson & The Miracles' irresistible

plays , were his choice or theirs and as such a definitive legacy for Gere-Kaye.

Those same chronicles also tell that Travolta dropped out of the project due to the protagonist's unveiled homosexual insinuations.

And that, more than fair, the film was described as

for the ridiculous and un-Schrader-like scene in the gay nightclub.

Over time, the director himself would apologize while he recognized that he was not exactly at his best then: «When I managed with half a gram on a weekend, it was a lot of fun.

But when I upgraded and started taking a gram a day, it wasn't fun anymore.

I wrote all night, and seeing in the morning that I only had a page and a half, I realized that I was not producing.

He had motor problems, ”he said in

by Peter Biskind.

The rest is legend.

Gere-Kaye became the very image of desire, desire, at last, naked.

Fleeting, already exhausted and slightly melancholic, but I wish at last.

The pain of the first penis.

As he later confessed: «When I accepted the role, it was not clear to me that I wanted to become a

But I guess if you want to make it as a movie star, you want to be desired.

I wouldn't say that's why I made the movie, but that's one of the reasons you want to succeed: to be noticed and appreciated.

Wanted".

Pause.

'Backroom'

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• cinema