It's 1963 and Paris is sizzling with sex. The stylishly butch Gigola spends her days roaming chic cafés, taking on the criminal underclass, enticing pretty femmes away from their pimps, breaking hearts and making enemies along the way. Her evenings are spent in famous lesbian cabaret bar Chez Moune, picking up rich older women who keep her flush. Based on the long censored novel of the same name, Gigola captures a little known chapter in Parisian history in which eroticism defied conventional morals.

Starring a host of renowned faces of European cinema, including Marisa Paredes (All About My Mother, The Skin I Live In), Rossy De Palma (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), Eduardo Noriega (Open Your Eyes, The Devil's Backbone), Thierry Lhermitte (The Dinner Game), Marisa Berenson (I Am Love) and introducing Lou Doillon, daughter of Jane Birkin, as the eponymous Gigola.
After having been censured in 1972, the novel GIGOLA written by Laure Charpentier (J.J. Pauvert ed.) was eventually published in 2002 (Fayard ed).

Duration: 102mins

DIRECTOR’S NOTE – LAURE CHARPENTIER

“The film Gigola has been in my mind for many years. The story of George aka Gigola is close to my own experiences in life. I‟ve met all the characters that surrounded her. I fully and crazily lived this time of the sixties in Paris, in the heart of Pigalle. Through image and sound the film Gigola will bring back to life all these memories of Parisian nightlife, when champagne and banknotes were flowing like water…
It was a time when pimps and prostitutes were making their own laws about who had what patch on the streets of Montmartre, about codes of honour, revenge and gunfights… Gunshots would ring out in the boulevards at dawn, the prostitutes chasing after those clients that tried to escape…
Many girls were disfigured, sometimes assassinated for cheating or for a forbidden embrace… Many lesbian women rejected by their families escaped towards the shadows of these so called “specialized” cabarets…”