This is a review of The Look of Love (2013)
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28 June (24 March 2015, Tweet added)
This is a review of The Look of Love (2013)
* Contains plenty of spoilers *
I was at a special screening of The Look of Love (2013), with Paul Willetts* present to take part in a question-and-answer session – he is the author of the book now of that name. (It had initially been published, we were told, under the title Members Only.)
One has to take with a pinch of salt whether the older man, looking back over his life in the wake of his daughter’s death, is genuine, or just film schmaltz – engendering a sympathy for Paul Raymond in some realistic mode, whereas significant parts of the rest of the film had Steve Coogan stamped all over them. Coogan, after all (which it took a question from me to elicit, when the Q&A until then had chosen to comment little on the film, how it came into being, or related topics), had approached Michael Winterbottom with the desire to make a film where he played the part.
What I take from the film is an attempt to show Raymond as a man whose primary (or initial) interest had been in the burlesque, showman side of things. That aim was significantly undermined by other aspects :
* Showing him destroying his own marriage by first taking sleeping with young hopefuls (with his wife Jean’s acquiescence) and coming home to her to tell her about it, and then starting bringing them to the marital bed, in selfish supposition that such swinging was as good for her as it was for him
* Willing – for money’s sake alone – to enter into partnership with Tony Power (even more sleazily played than Raymond by Chris Addison) to start publishing the trademark magazines (and like products)
* Seeming, in fact, to be unable to relate to anyone except on the level of a transaction**, even his beloved daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) when talking to his advisers forces him to decide that he cannot keep taking the financial losses of the big show that she is fronting (as a singer) : in this scene, Debbie is clearly hurting at the news, but Raymond has nothing to offer her (no suggestions for alternatives or much comfort), and can only question why she is crying, and keep urging her not to, almost as one of Coogan’s most famous creations might
* This coldness was typified by a stiffly awkward and dutiful reception of Derry, his son from a pre-marital relationship, with just Cooganesque utterances*** to cover thinly the lack of anything to say to him – the closing titles tell us that Raymond, in comparison with the millions left to granddaughters Fawn and India Rose, left Derry nothing
Raymond as presenter of spectaclesis there, but more drawn upon by what Willetts had to say, for the film really tries to show Raymond as driven, but pitifully lost in a world of cocaine, sexy women and alcohol. From the moment when Powers persuades him to have another go at publishing, and Men Only is launched, the spectacles become the different and more specific ones of solo women posing for the camera.
(The film casually interjects Powers telling a model not to spread her legs so much with the words This isn’t Germany, thereby establishing both the standards of the day and Powers’ prowess in showing what could be shown. Raymond is often enough shown there, but looking as if having as much fun as on a wet afternoon in Scarborough.)
Powers, until he falls from favour for apparently not being able to handle his coke (he has a sordid fate listed in the closing titles), is just as much a catalyst for change in Raymond’s life as the lion whose interaction with two bare-breasted women lands him in court. Thus another thing that can be seen about how Matt Greenhalgh (who wrote Nowhere Boy (2009) about the young John Lennon) sought to effect is a serendipitous universe in which Raymond lives and which he – with the major exception of Debbie’s death – creates and controls.
Unfortunately, as with the footage where India Rose is in the back of the car with him and quizzing Raymond as to which Soho properties he owns, it all feels like an over-simplification, and then one asks what the point is. So one comes back to Coogan wanting to do this with Geoffrey Anthony Quinn, born 15 November 1925, and I have no idea whether that pre-dates the death in March 2008 (though it is not as if Willetts appears to have rushed out a biography).
A comment in a review on the film’s IMDb page suggests that Coogan had been turned down in favour of Geoffrey Rush for playing Peter Sellers – however, if so, that film was released in 2004, so it seems unlikely that Coogan harboured the loss, and The Look of Love is ‘compensation’. If he had really wanted to play a funny man like Sellers, why not have selected, as a project, a number of other comics who have died in the last decade or before ?
But there were the out-of-place Partidgeisms – as a rich man, Raymond had no need to make ludicrous and highly self-conscious attempts at witticisms to get women into bed (since, whatever Coogan may think about his own magnetic powers, Raymond had more of a power of preferment that rendered him attractive). It was clearly part of Coogan’s desire to play the part that they should be there, even though they did feel tacked on, and not at the heart of the role :
Willetts, who said that he had been a script consultant, agreed, when answering my question, that the film-makers seemed pleased, even boastful, that they had Cooganized it more and more as it progressed, and one certainly cannot claim, whatever merit the ambition possessed, that they failed.
Yet what it does leave us with is a Raymond who, although wealthy and successful, is alone and probably lacking love at the end, self-obsessedly reliving Debbie’s life and the images surrounding her death – as a purely linear device, it is also, of course, a way of inducing suspense into the story for us, leaving us to wonder, as we work back from an orphaned India Rose, when the moment has come for her to die (and how that will be – we are on edge when Raymond closes the show as to whether it is then with a mixture of heroin, alcohol and a broken heart).
By Debbie’s death in 1992 (although we only heard about this), she had been playing the role that she found for herself of taking over from Powers, and her father had started letting her take over the business. Was he lost, as much as anything, by not being able to leave the pornography and property portfolio in her hands, however much he seemed to show that he did really care for her ?
(There was a slightly strange, because undwelt-on, detail in that, when he split with model Fiona Richmond (whose relationship with Raymond had helped break the marriage), she moved in with Debbie.)
It appears that there is to be another film about Raymond, for which this one made way by taking a different from his nickname, The King of Soho. Will it, as Raymond’s other son is involved, give us a less-romanticized account, where he does not end his days grieving over Debbie and, probably, for his past life, and where he is not played by someone quite so keen to mould the title role to his image ?
Post-script
I think that Antonia Quirke's review (in The Financial Times) is quite fun, and spot on about the Britishness, and there is a good little video linked to in Peter Bradshaw's.
Looking at the publicity material, I have no idea whether Raymond ever said something about what he achieved was not bad for a boy from Liverpool who just had a five-bob note in his pocket : if he said it, one nonetheless felt that Coogan was ficitionalizing his own career's success in and around such detail; if not, that it was in the melting-pot of Coogan creating Raymond in his own image.
Coogan is interviewed on film with Winterbottom, but, in what I saw, all that they touch on is the simple riches-are-empty paradigm.
End-notes
* Perhaps seriously, as I do not recall, IMDb credits Willetts as Lord Longford.
** Echoes of Mark Ravenhill’s Fucking and Shopping ?
*** Including the running joke as to who Raymond claimed had done the interior of his flat, which at one point was George Harrison, another Yoko ?
