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Michael
Winterbottom's The Look of Love is a comedy-drama that
never needed to be funny. The film is above all else a tragedy about
how a
man's wealth and his real estate empire clouded his judgment in all of
his
relationships. He earned his wealth through establishing his Revue Bars
in
Soho, the West End of London during the late 1950s. These bars featured
nude
female models, who were allowed to move on stage, which was deemed
illegal at
the time.
Raymond
then established his Men's
Only magazine, which was a pornographic publication. His rise in wealth
and
property through the 60s and 70s led for him to be titled by the
mid-90s as
"The King of Soho". Paul Raymond was declared in 1992 to be one of
the richest men in Britain. He died in 2008 with a fortune that was
said to be
worth over six-hundred million dollars.
This is
the fourth film Winterbottom
has made with Steve Coogan, after Tristram
Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Trip and 24 Hour
Party People. Coogan specialises in playing shallow,
self-absorbed, stuffy characters. His performance as Raymond is
familiar but
extremely engaging and darkly funny. Accompanied by some hilariously
silly
innuendo-laden dialogue, he uses his voice to express the pompousness
and
artificialness of Raymond's self-made identity.
He values
his wealth and celebrity
image over sustained relationships. One of the stories he repeats is
that his
apartment was designed by Ringo Starr. A tracking shot as he walks
through the
room shows the sustained but untouched and unfulfilled construct of his
lifestyle.
In the
context of censorship laws,
the incredibly frank and confronting stage shows have a historical
resonance,
which is further complimented by their utter ridiculousness. Some of
Raymond's
stage ideas, like combing Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun on stage with
nude
female models, are strange and hilarious.
Yet Paul
Raymond is also in many
ways a terrible man. His wife Jean (Anna Friel) willingly lets him
cheat on her
and he relates to his daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots), not through
ordinary
parental wisdom, but the advice of a business partner. When she eats
all of the
cakes he buys for her, he tells her that they're not all for her but
for the
other girls so that she'll have friends. Similarly, when she cries
about being
cut from one his shows as a singer he doesn't reassure her about future
but
argues that he can't let the show keep bleeding money.
What the
screenplay from first time
writer Matt Greenhalgh lacks is a deeper understanding of both the
reactions and
the immobility of the characters. The film is about Raymond's
relationships
with three different women and despite all of the ones that he sleeps
with,
works with and exploits, he understands none of them. Rather
unintentionally,
the film is like this too.
The
female characters contradict
themselves in confusing ways. His first wife knows about his affairs
but is
still surprised and upset when he finally leaves her. His mistress
Fiona
(Tamsin Egerton) is no fool either. She writes for his magazine and
models in
his shows. She engages with him and other women in acts of threesomes
but
leaves him when he can't offer a normal life.
The film
is extremely alert to
Raymond letting his own daughter fatally self-destruct through her
cocaine addiction
(he advises her to buy the good stuff) but at the end the film still
makes an
attempt to reach for our undeserving sympathy. The image of the
supposedly
talentless daughter singing beautifully over the end credits is also a
confusing
one.
If the
film was not told through
such a rigid, episodic structure, treating the lives of characters like
small
vignettes (cancer, marriage and addiction), there would have been
stronger
ongoing threads of conflict and more time invested into understanding
these
characters. Some of them are truly sadder than funny.
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