Schrader captures the shift in American cinema from the experimentation of the 1970s to the quietism of the 1980s in this play of surfaces and depths centered on a Los Angeles gigolo accused of a murder he may or may not have committed. A rich evocation of late 70s Los Angeles – the Armani clothes, the Giorgio Moroder score, a subdued pastel palette – American Gigolo is also the work of Schrader’s closest to Bresson, a director revered by Schrader and one of the subjects of his fascinating book Transcendental Style in Film. Richard Gere stars – in a career defining role – as the titular hero who, for all his activity and self-fashioning, remains a passive figure through whom we glimpse both the void of existence and, ultimately, the possibility of transcendence.