THE LAST GIGOLOS (Stephan Bergmann). Subtitled. 91 minutes. Opens Friday (August 14) at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See
listings. Rating: NN
Professionally they’re known as “gentleman hosts,” though in the olden days they would have been called taxi dancers. They’re the debonair men who work on cruise liners as entertainment support, inviting female passengers on to the dance floor so no one feels alone.
Stephan Bergmann’s documentary The Last Gigolos makes it clear that they’re not, in fact, gigolos. It’s an unspoken rule of the sea that the gentleman host does not take his dance partner to bed and that no fee shall be accepted for any such service.
And so Bergmann’s camera just glides along as his subjects, Peter Nemela and Heinz Löffelbein, discuss their love of the sea and their enjoyment of the company of women. Two of those women, Bärbel Schlömer and Barbara Maierhofer, talk about how much they enjoy that male attention while travelling. They all dance together. They look happy. It’s boring.
That’s pretty much it, aside from an odd mid-movie pivot into the bowels of the ship, where kitchen workers and housekeeping staff are hard at work. This has absolutely nothing to do with the main narrative and led me to wonder if Bergmann had started out making a movie about cruise life, only to be distracted by Nemela and Löffelbein. Perhaps he should have stayed focused.
