The last time Michael Winterbottom directed Steve Coogan in a biopic we got the spectacularly original and post-modern 24 Hour Party People. We knew it was postmodern because Coogan, as Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, kept addressing the audience to tell them so. It was a uniquely innovative film from one of Britain’s most exciting filmmakers, built around a performance from one of Britain’s most underrated and gifted actors. So at first it’s a real disappointment that Winterbottom’s biopic of pornographer and impresario Paul Raymond is so conventional and that Coogan’s performance is so uncharacteristically understated.
However, once you get past that initial disappointment, it turns out that as conventional biopics go this is a pretty entertaining one. Its main problem is that it just skims the surface of what is undoubtedly an interesting life story, rather than plunging in and letting us get to know Raymond and what made him tick. By the end you do feel invested in Raymond’s story, which contains some comedy, some tragedy and a massive amount of nudity, but you don’t feel you know him any better then you did at the beginning.
The Look of Love charts Raymond’s rise from 1958 to 1992, from humble beginnings finding various cheeky ways to bypass decency laws with his stage shows, to his position as head of a pornography empire that would lead to him becoming Britain’s richest man. The earlier scenes are filmed in warmly nostalgic black and white and framed to resemble an Ealing comedy of the same era (albeit one with enough nudity to give 1950s audiences heart attacks) but as Raymond’s empire grows, along with his cocaine habit it all starts to feel grittier and sleazier. By the time we get to the early 90s and the film’s tragic denouement, everything is shot with documentary realism.
It’s a journey that would be a lot more absorbing if we were taking it with a more interesting character. In the extra features Coogan talks about how what was really unusual about Raymond was how normal he was. You’d expect a millionaire pornographer whose hobbies include recreational drug use and orgies to be quite a flamboyant figure but Raymond by all accounts was a low-key, aloof and kind of boring chap. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this means that no matter how uncannily Coogan inhabits Raymond, he just isn’t attractive enough as a character to anchor the story.
It doesn’t help that the cast is full of comedians. Stephen Fry, Matt Lucas, David Walliams and Simon Bird all crop up giving performances that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Carry On film. The strangest bit of casting is Chris Addison in a major role as photographer Tony Powers. Addison has proved with In The Loop and The Thick of It that he’s a fine comic actor when he’s playing someone close to his own stand-up persona. Unfortunately here he’s cast against type as a sleazy cokehead and just comes across as the stand-up comedian Chris Addison in a fake beard trying and failing to be lewd.
The story is at its most interesting when it’s focused on Raymond’s relationship with the three most important women in his life, his wife Jean (Anna Friel), Mistress Amber (Tamsin Egerton) and daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots). All three give terrific performances that feel like they belong in an actual film rather than a pantomime. Poots is especially fantastic and once Debbie becomes a major character in the third act, when the film finds its focus and heart and it really becomes her story.
One thing the film never finds though is anything worthwhile to say about pornography. The Look of Love seems to want to take a completely neutral stance and not to have to query Raymond’s morality. Although at one point the question of whether his business is degrading to women is put to Raymond, he dismisses this with the answer “No, it isn’t and the matter is never discussed again. It’s a bold and pretty funny moment but also feels like kind of a cop-out, especially at the moment when the objectification of women and the possibly damaging effects of pornography are such hot topics. In fact the whole film is something of a cop-out. It’s an engagingly bawdy story that manages to turn tragic subtly and believably but it’ll be remembered as a minor effort from Winterbottom and Coogan and a missed opportunity for them to delve into the mind of a smutty pioneer.
Overall Verdict: A disappointingly straight-forward biopic from Winterbottom and Coogan that just about manages to balance comedy and tragedy and entertain for 90 minutes. It keeps your attention and has moments that are funny and moving but it’s ultimately a hollow experience that doesn’t let you get to know or particularly care about its central figure or the industry he helped create.
Special Features:
Deleted Scenes
Paul Raymond Timeline
Interviews with cast & crew
Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon