FILMThe Look Of Love
(18) 101mins
★★★★★
IN A NUTSHELL
Confessions of the King of Soho are a guilty pleasure and a glorious evocation of an age of tawdry hedonism.
REVIEW
Actor Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom have worked together three times before this film. 24 Hour Party People, A Cock & Bull Story and The Trip showed the inventiveness of one is able to thrive despite the singular presence of the other, and vice-versa.
Here, their partnership works brilliantly once more in a fast-moving, funny and bawdy biopic that should feel tawdry but ends up a gloriously guilty pleasure.
Although the life of Paul Raymond was marked by tragedy - the framing device of the drama - Winterbottom sets out his tonal preferences with his casting.
A plethora of cameos from the front rank of comedy illuminate the brown-and-orange backdrops of a Spam fritter Britain.
Chris Addison gets a meaty role as bearded acolyte Mike Power and Simon Bird gives a spot-on turn as a '70s hipster. Also blink-and-miss Stephen Fry, Matt Lucas, David Walliams, Miles Jupp and Dara O'Briain.
In an age of internet porn for 12-year-olds, Paul Raymond's daring burlesques appear like chirpy end-of-pier fodder and our sympathies are clearly with the rule-busting impresario.
Indeed, the joy of this beautifully-designed film comes in the unabashed schoolboy relish of a man let loose in the Candy (and Amber) shop.
Cheeky chappie Paul Raymond loved and lost many people, most poignantly, his family. Wife Jean (Anna Friel) quits Britain as a result of his affair with wily beauty Fiona Richmond (Tamsin Egerton), who also packs a suitcase.
Meanwhile daddy's girl Debbie (a mercurial Imogen Poots) dabbles in singing but drowns in drugs, dying of an overdose a month after dad is named Britain's richest man.
All the actors relish Matt Greenhalgh's whipcrack script which bundles along at speed and is packed with one-liners that are in places (and almost inevitably) pedantically Partridge-esque.
The Look Of Love is not only the Dusty Springfield song that the delicate Poots sings but also the illusion Raymond maintains to sidestep the corrupting debasement of his reality.
That the film neatly marries the two without diminishing the impact of either makes for a filthy, rich, and indelibly British, romp.
