After the calamity that was Chris Menges's The Lost Son, Daniel Auteuil has returned to Swinging London to make another film in English. He is Pierre, a slightly wizened fortysomething French intellectual who has succumbed to the male equivalent of a menopausal hot flash. In a Reggie Perrin-like revelatory moment, Pierre has seen the rat-race rut he is in, so he chucks in his job in France lecturing in literature, bids au revoir to his wife and son and gets on the first plane to London, where he is kipping down in a horrific Bayswater hotel, hoping to write a novel.
He is in a terrible state or, as the French say, a mauvaise passe - the film's original title. But director Michel Blanc and his collaborator Hanif Kureishi devise for him an unlikely salvation: beaten up by a Soho clip-joint bouncer one night, Pierre is patched up by Tom (Stuart Townsend), an unfeasibly handsome and kindly coffee bar manager, who introduces Pierre to his own lucrative sideline - being a male escort. Pierre is an instant success in this dubious trade; he sees in it heaven-sent material for his novel, and in this metropolitan excitement he sees a thrilling access to the reality denied him as a bourgeois husband and father. But his writing falters and Pierre wonders if his vocation is not the novel but simply high-class prostitution.
It sounds like the material for comedy, and sometimes that is precisely what it is, intentionally or otherwise. But with Kureishi supplying the inspiration for the daring-yet-bohemian swinging sex scenes and Daniel Auteuil in the leading role, a very cool, dangerous urban movie is clearly what it is supposed to be. The craggily charismatic Franglais gigolo or beau de jour is turning the tables on gender expectations of what prostitution is.
The problem is that, in English, Auteuil is a seal out of water. In French, he has a quicksilver eloquence when this is called upon; and when it is not, his silences are haughty, elegant, patrician. But forced into English, he barks his shins on our Anglo-Saxon syllables, and sounds absurd. Many a time he shouts his defiance or passion in English and it sounds something like: "Ah doo nuert cay-arrr weurt yoo seenk eurve me, bee-coze ah eurm ern OAR!"
This is a shame, because otherwise Daniel Auteuil is almost Bogart-like in his fierce air of seclusion, his grizzled manner of having seen the world, combined with an openness to romantic persuasion.
What is interesting about Michel Blanc's movie is that much of it works perfectly well. There is something dashing and fast in his swift cutting between scenes, from encounter to encounter, and sometimes from city to city. The resulting affectless impression of speed and detachment nicely complements the tone of irony in this urban tale, and the comic nightmare of Auteuil's character having to show his penis in advance to various clients. And the British cast Blanc assembles is really quite striking in its classy range of big and biggish names from TV and movies: Amanda Ryan, Frances Barber, Keith Allen, Barbara Flynn, Anastasia Hille. Noah Taylor has about one line as an obnoxious rich drunk at a party at which Pierre is "working": was his contribution supposed to be that subliminal? Or was most of his stuff cut?
Anyway, this cameo-pageant is crowned by the furious Peter Mullan, who plays the husband of Claire Skinner, whom Pierre cynically tells he loves to secure her long-term custom as a "regular". Mullan growls something about how Pierre's fee is equivalent to a month of his wages and lays him out with a sucker punch. It is a nice performance from Skinner, though she is a little too county-set for the pairing to be anything other than implausible. It is unfortunate that Liza Walker's role, as the tart-with-a-heart who falls for Pierre, is the most slackly and unconvincingly written.
Ultimately, the film describes what is a kind of would-be 21st-century Hogarthian progress as Pierre becomes more and more reliant on the white powder that he had been warned by the wise and almost fatherly Tom never to use except to loosen up a client. He is heading for another mauvaise passe and the movie appears to conclude by suggesting that once you're on the game, there's no way out. At least we are spared any student-ish cant about us all being prostitutes.
Auteuil's undoubted charisma carries it off - just about. But, in the end, The Escort feels like a swanky artistic fantasy of what is actually involved in prostitution; the movie strains for the secret banal horror of the hotel-room transaction, and for an ironic and sophisticated take on the "scene" surrounding it, yet opts for a moralistic assumption of a bad end for Pierre if he remains on the game - while moreover remaining unaware of what the real effects are of a long-term career in "escort" work. Is it different for boys? Or not? Nothing in the script, or Auteuil's perky, craggy face can really tell us.
