The Look of Love
★★★
Dir: Michael Winterbottom
(2013)
Steve Coogan manages to keep Alan Partridge at bay in Michael Winterbottom's fourth collaboration with the comic master. The Look of Love is a film which most closely resembles 24 Party People's decade trotting bio pic-ery, this film feels a little more extravagant in its style but its subject, the life and times of Paul Raymond, London's figurehead in all things pornographic, is quite fascinating. We trace Raymond's beginnings in the 50s through to the early 90s and though the film is fresh and fast, styled in various ways to reflect the decade in question, but sadly we don't quite get the depth of Raymond that Winterbottom and Coogan were aiming for.
A portrayal of a family and their separation, vignettes of the relationships formed in the darker parts of Soho' strip clubs and a look at the changing boundaries of titillation and pornography, the film feels much seedier and basic than Paul Thomas Anderson's epic Boogie Nights, a picture which shares many similar themes. The downward spiral can be sensed a mile off in biopics such as this (even if you are unaware of Raymond's life) but the focus here is on haphazard period detail and a fine central show. Winterbottom also pulls some fantastic performances out of Coogans supporting cast, no more so than from a remarkable Imogen Poots as Debbie, Raymond's only remaining tie to his family and from The Thick of It's Chris Addison as Raymond's photographer cohort.
There are things that don't work, Raymond's addiction to sex and cocaine seems to be overly driven home, perhaps on purpose in fitting with Raymond's own addictive personality, but the seemingly endless three in the bed scenes end up being as numbing as the mounds of white powder themselves. Sometimes it feels a little more like melodramatic than the producers may have liked with the family focus wavering in effectiveness throughout. A meeting with Raymond's estranged son in his penthouse apartment is particular sad and touching but his own marriage and divorce with his first wife Jean (Anna Friel) often feels far too thin to make way for the upcoming debauchery.
Never sentimental, often wildly speculative and sometimes overly glamourising The Look of Love has been a pet project of Coogan's for more than 10 years now and if you know his own public persona and his willingness to poke fun at himself (see the excellent The Trip) it's easy to see why. Is the actor's mustachioed doppelgänger here just another hell raising and controversial maverick with whom Coogan sympathises in a self-congratulatory way? Or is The Look of Love's down beat ending really about the man getting to grips with his own past and his own mistakes? An entertaining, well made but slightly shallow look at a very interesting fellow indeed.
