Steve Coogan stares directly at the camera with one eyebrow
raised and says, "My name is Paul Raymond. Welcome to my world of
erotica." When The Look of Love opens in this way, it's hard not to recall
Coogan's first collaboration with director Michael Winterbottom, 24 Hour Party People.
In that film, Coogan played Tony Wilson and frequently broke the fourth wall to
offer his commentary on events as we watched them unfold. But The Look of Love
is not a film in a similar vein to that portrait of the Manchester music scene,
and this early moment of self-awareness is not representative of the film's
subsequent tone. In fact, it is more suggestive of a picture that doesn't seem
sure what exactly it wants to be, or what story it wants to tell, from one
scene to the next.
This lack of a coherent focus continues with the film's
opening scenes, which are set in the early 1960s and are shot in black-and-white,
although Winterbottom makes no attempt to impose similar distinctive aesthetics
on any of the subsequent decades that his film covers. At this time, Paul
Raymond was a touring coastal towns with his saucy variety act, and thirty
years later his sex and property empire made him the richest man in Britain.
This is undoubtedly a remarkable rise and compelling films have been built out
of less interesting figures, but Winterbottom and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh
aren't disciplined enough to focus on the key areas of the tale and to dig
beneath the flashy surface.
The strongest thread is the relationship between Raymond and
his daughter Debbie, played with an affecting fragility by Imogen Poots. Debbie
was the child with whom Raymond had the deepest bond (his son left for America
with his wife after the breakup of their marriage) and he had planned to hand
the running of his various businesses on to her before she died from a drug
overdose in 1992. Winterbottom occasionally cuts from the narrative to scenes
of an ageing Raymond sitting alone, watching footage of his lost daughter, lost
in his memories and his grief. It's a big stretch for Coogan to bring the necessary
gravitas to this role (the ghosts of Tony Wilson, Alan Partridge and Tony
Ferrino are never fully dispelled), but the moments in which he genuinely seems
to connect with Poots are where the film briefly takes on another dimension. When Raymond has to
face the fact that his daughter is not talented enough to lead the show he
wrote for her, the scenes between them carry a real emotional weight. The fact
that the film's title comes from a song that Debbie sings indicates that this
is the heart of the story, but it's something that Winterbottom only flits in
and out of, as he gets derailed by other, less rewarding, details.
The Look of Love is a maddeningly uneven picture. When it isn't
squeezing in distracting comic cameos (Stephen Fry, Dara O'Briain, Matt Lucas
and David Walliams) or unilluminating montages, it's indulging rote scenes of hedonistic excess that feel
like little more than a watered-down Boogie Nights. Potentially intriguing
aspects of Raymond's tale are left frustratingly unexplored, such as his discovery
of a son from a previous relationship, which is raised and then forgotten about
in a single scene. The film hops along in its energetic but episodic fashion,
as if we should congratulate the filmmakers for touching upon so many aspects
of the Paul Raymond story instead of questioning whether they have sufficiently
explored any of it.
Michael Winterbottom is a director whose refusal to be
pinned down and categorised has resulted in a body of work that is wonderfully
eclectic in its style and content. But he can't quite find the right approach
here, and the result is a fleetingly enjoyable but ultimately shallow and
unfocused biopic. Winterbottom directed one of the all-time great London-based
films with his 1999 drama Wonderland, and there was certainly potential for
another landmark capital picture in this study of "The King of Soho,"
but the only real point of interest for Londoners lies in spotting the familiar
locations that act as backdrop to the disappointingly mundane story.
