The Look of Love
Starring: Steve Coogan, Imogen Poots, Anna Friel, Tasmin Egerton
Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Reviewed by: Adam Harmer
[rating: 4/5]
To those familiar with the films of Steve Coogan and Michael Winterbottom, The Look of Love will carry a very familiar sense of unexpectedness – which is meant in the most complimentary way.
The pair have now made a few films (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy and The Trip), all of which teeter between absurdly experimental dramas and morbid comedies. And while I’d hesitate to declare them masterpieces, they’re quality films that have all secured a loyal audience and become undeniable cult classics. So considering the legacy laid out before it, The Look Of Love had much to live up to.
This time around the director/actor pair present a biography of sorts, telling the sordid tale of Paul Raymond, at one time, Britain’s richest man. A controversial public figure, Raymond was born into poverty but managed to build an enormous fortune on the adult entertainment industry in England.
We first meet Raymond (Coogan) as an elderly man toward the end of his life, having to deal with a tragic event. An old biographical staple, the film then transports us back years earlier showing us the man’s rise from the seedy and humble beginnings of running burlesque shows out of a club in Soho in the late fifties. Many of the specific plot details follow along as one would expect, through London’s swinging sixties as Raymond delves into the business of nudie magazines, sexual experimentation, heavy drug use and a general hedonistic spiral which continues through the seventies and eighties. The first act of the film shows the decline of Raymond’s marriage and the second focuses mainly on his own personal demons. It’s not until further toward the end that we start to see what I feel is the point of the film, once a relationship is established between Raymond and his grown up offspring. The resulting drama is fantastic and it’s a shame it arrives so late.
The fact that these biopics of a pseudo-celebrity’s risings and fallings are a dime a dozen is irrelevant. Some clichés, it seems, are unavoidable. In the end it’s the style of the film that matters – the character that Winterbottom and Coogan deliver as always. It breathes new life into a familiar genre. There’s solid writing from Matt Greenhalgh and a myriad of great performances. Not only from Coogan, but Anna Friel as his ex-wife and the incredible Imogen Poots as Debbie, his daughter, work fantastically. Even Winterbottom adds some extra dimensions to his directing style, delivering perhaps the most structured narrative of all his films while keeping things interesting.
The film’s depiction of London’s decadent sixties scene is dark and edgy with real drama and substance, but all tied together with Coogan’s wonderful dry humour. The bottom line is, this film will entertain you, I believe, whether or not you’re familiar with its authors.
Also it should be said for the sensitive, the film contains a lot of coarse language, drug use and more nudity than I can recall in a recent cinema release. For some this may hamper your enjoyment, but for the rest of us, it only amplifies it.
