With American Gigolo, Paul Schrader seems to have found his footing as a director—and achieved a measure of distance from (might one say transcended?) his obsessions as a writer. Not that he has really relaxed his Calvinist grip on the plot mechanism: characters are stuffed willy-nilly down a determinist tunnel, and one feels a tortured Providence-as-dramatist—rather than any inner necessity or logic—behind their every move and utterance. The hero of American Gigolo is more fortunate than most in that he doesn't have to say very much, though there is one grotesque moment of 'naked' truth in which he stands undressed by a window—the barred lighting that falls across him will be repeated to more ominous effect in a later scene—and professes his pride in having done "something very worthwhile" by taking three hours to bring a neglected woman to orgasm. He is spared the spiritual ordeal of the outraged father in Hardcore, who plunges through a meretricious purgatory to a hypocritical redemption. Though Julian Kay is presented from the beginning as being in a kind of hell: the camera prowls after him into the pinkly glowing inferno of a night-club, or snakes along much closer to the floor towards the bed in which Julian is doing something particularly loathsome (talking 'dirty' over the phone to one of his clients). That movement is repeated later in the film when Julian reaches the pit of this particular Hades, a disco which seems to epitomise everything ('fag tricks', 'kink') which Julian has ruled out of his repertoire. The real hell, of course, is inside Julian (in Schrader's words, "He is only able to give. He is unable to receive, and so he has perfected himself into giving"), and on one level the novelty of American Gigolo is that the hero's inevitable release is somewhat less violent than the Schrader norm ("… what he is building toward is not an explosion but an implosion"). The concluding passage comes, however, as a rather forced epiphany. The characters seem to emerge too late from the determinist tunnel into the sunlight of spiritual tranquillity: Julian, in prison awaiting trial for the murder for which he has been framed, is detached, not to say lackadaisical, about his own defence. The rhythm of the film slows—and its spiritual space, presumably, opens—to accommodate long fades to black in between scenes, and Michelle's self-sacrificing action on his behalf brings Julian to an acceptance of love, and Schrader to his most determinedly Bressonian moment. In the last shot, Julian lays his head on the partitioning glass next to Michelle's hand and murmurs, "It's taken me so long to come to you"…. What is notable about American Gigolo, however, is that Schrader's 'European' pretensions for the first time seem to have been integrated with the style of the film: the camera, here almost deliriously liberated from its prosaic functions in Blue Collar and Hardcore, drifts through the neighbourhoods of Los Angeles and some rather splendid scenery on Julian's drive to Palm Springs in a way that almost out-Antonionis Zabriskie Point. The detachment for which the plot has to work so hard is quite gracefully achieved at this level. In the process, Schrader's 'transcendental cinema' even incorporates other models: the sequence in which Julian, now suspecting the plot against him, rips his room apart looking for a plant, observed by a camera stealthily tracking at a very high angle, conjures [Bernardo] Bertolucci in its lighting and staging …, and love-making between Julian and Michelle becomes a montage of body geometry, à la the Godard of Une Femme Mariée. (p. 88)