FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
CANNES – Richard Gere appears in a wheelchair, a blanket over the girls. She has very short, white and sparse hair, and an unkempt beard. She fights cancer. What happened to theAmerican Gigolo by Paul Schrader? In Oh, Canadafrom the bestseller Foregone by Russell Banks and competing at the festival, Gere and Schrader reunite after 44 years. In Italy the film will be distributed by Be Water with the title The betrayals.
It is the story of a famous documentary filmmaker who is now elderly, interviewed in a TV report on his life by an old student, at the time when he was teaching. Among his students there was Uma Thurmanof whom he was a mentor before marrying her, who witnesses the shocking confession of her husband, who as a young man took refuge in Canada to avoid being called to arms in the war in Vietnam.
While he remembers, the film with images goes back and forth in time, and he as a boy (the actor playing the role of Gere as a young man is the Australian Jacob Elordi, who played Elvis Presley in Priscilla by Sofia Coppola) shows up for the military service wearing underwear featuring a flower and the symbol of peace. At a mature age, long before ending up in a wheelchair, Richard Gere appears graying and in great shape in the film, 74 years old and in great shape.
Naturally, there are other disturbances on the part of the American progressive idealist whose memory sometimes goes haywire and confuses things. But there are many lies on which he has built his life, and the responsibilities from which he has escaped: «Each of us has secrets – says the actor -. There comes a day when you want to spill the beans, and that happens while you have a camera pointed at you. It’s a theme I talk about in the film, reality and fiction, sometimes it seems like we can’t exist except as fictional characters. Everyone “assembles” their life, even subconsciously. And my wife, a strong woman played by Uma, shouts at the author of the documentary on my life: stop, stop, stop.”
Another shock is seeing the gentleman Richard so badly dressed in his make-up, he who remains young in the imagination. «But the sense of the past and of the roots – says the actor with his unmistakable oblique smile – is something that concerns Europe. In America they tell me, okay you’re Richard Gere, but what is your next film about?”.
On the other hand in the story, his wife Uma Thurman who loves him madly defines him “a survivor”. He smiles: «I had worked with Uma a long time ago, in 1991, in Final analysis, where she plays Kim Basinger’s little sister.” Three years later Uma Thurman was competing in Cannes (she has lost count of how many times she has been here) for pulp Fiction by Tarantino. At his second job, won the Palme d’Or amidst boos, he reacted with the middle finger to the audience and then became a cult.
Richard Gere is friends with Paul Schrader, «there is total mutual trust, he called me out of the blue, told me he had a story ready. Okay, she’s counting on me. She didn’t discard a single shot.” From American Gigolo he remembers that he went «on a motorbike, in jeans and a tee-shirt, I had never heard of Armani, who dressed my character. When the film came out they considered me an elegant man, but I was a simple American who knew nothing about fashion.”
He says he never watches his films again, «and when it happens I’m embarrassed, he seems like a different person. As a boy I was shy, I played baseball and played the trumpet in the band.”
He is at peace with himself, happily Buddhist (“I begin my days with a prayer, all men are equal in their desire for happiness”), far from Hollywood (“it’s a foreign word nowI’ve been in low-budget independent films for 20 years”) married to Alejandra Silva. They have two children aged 4 and 5, “we don’t go out much, in the evening we all go to bed at half past nine in the evening”.
