“He’s mixing things together, memories, films, fantasies, other people’s stories”
Sorry we couldn’t find any sessions for this event.
If you think this might be a mistake please contact us.
Writer-director Paul Schrader reunites with Richard Gere for the first time since American Gigolo in Oh, Canada, an innovative and elegiac adaptation of the late Russell Banks’ novel Forgone. As life nears its conclusion, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife (Gere) sits down for an extensive interview with his former student Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), watched on by his wife Emma (Uma Thurman). Throughout several layers of reminiscent flashbacks, Leonard (whose past self is portrayed by Jacob Elordi) reveals his storied career, tales of lovers past, his avoidance of the Vietnam War draft with fib and fact bleeding into one another, or so it seems.
“Schrader realizes a tale of immense complexity with bold ease”
“Gere gives his best performance in years”
“Godard famously called cinema “truth 24 frames-per-second,” as film history proceeds, that idea seems almost quaint. Schrader acknowledges it, plays with it, and subverts it here with masterly innovation”
Following a string of hospitalisations and anticipating his own passing, Paul Schrader was keen to make a film about mortality, perhaps his final (although he’s already onto the next one). Adapting Russell Banks’ novel (whom he previously adapted for Affliction and who was fighting cancer when Paul approached him about this project), casting a tremendous Richard Gere as his own avatar (the ‘Dying Gigolo’ as he put it), while taking notes from Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Schrader has created a layered, self-reflexive elegy to New Hollywood, demythologising a man not dissimilar to himself nor his brother Leonard (who fled the draft to Japan).