Gigolo

Michael Lucas delivers his usual deadpan non-performance in the title role of "Gigolo", which he also produced and co-directed with writer/cameraman Tony Dimarco. They teamed up for some excellent features "The Intern" and "La Dolce Vita" but yield a relentlessly dreary and tiresome opus this time. (In more recent years Lucas and co. have devoted their time to all-sex and gonzo crap.)

It's fashionably in flashback, book-ended by shots of Lucas's corpse, victim of strangulation in his apartment. How he ended up in that state is depicted amidst six over-long Gay Sex scenes, with zero degrees of freedom for his downtrodden, doomed character Louis McMann.

McMann is grieving after the death of his partner, a Wall Street banker played in cameo flashback shots by Spencer Quest. He's assumed his debts and is behind in his rent, credit card payments, etc. So McMann has gone back to turning tricks, shown by an introductory scene humping a stud who pays him $300 for the service.

Louis is forced to sell a beloved painting of theirs to keep the wolf from the door, but is immediately in trouble with his old pimp, who harasses him, beats him up and in the genre cliché well-known from mainstream treatments of this subject matter will not permit one of his boys to freelance. He frames him for murder and then as the coup de grace gets one of his rough-sex call boys to off him via strangulation (off-camera, we only see the result).

Cast of sex professionals perform their suck & f*ck duties mechanically with an emphasis on three-ways. I watched the DVD version, but IMDb's keywords imply that the Lucas director's cut features his favorite fetish of Golden Shower action. The 2nd disk in the DVD package is worthless, with trailers, a very brief and silly BTS, and some pointless bonus footage.

As usual for a corrupt industry, this loser got a vast number of award nominations, none of them deserved. How it failed to win is clearly a demonstration that even corruption has its upper limits.