Dir. Malcolm Venville, UK, 2009, 95 mins
Cast: Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Ian McShane
Review by Carol Allen
Writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto first showed their facility for vivid language in their stage play Gangster No 1, though they abandoned the screenplay of that to another writer in favour of their first feature film Sexy Beast . That same rhythmic and poetic use of language, heavily peppered with four letter words, is one of the stars of this show, where it perfectly captures a heightened version of London gangster speak. The film also benefits from strongly drawn characters and a top notch cast to play them.
The story is a pretty simple one. Colin (Winstone) is in pieces as a result of his wife's affair with a young French waiter. His mates, Old Man Peanut (Hurt), Meredith (McShane), Archie (Tom Wilkinson) and Mal (Stephen Dillane), kidnap the unfortunate waiter (Melvil Poupaud), known only as Loverboy, and take him to a derelict house in the East End for Colin to do his worst with him and wreak his revenge.
Director Venville has a background in photography and television commercials and brings an assured visual style to his first feature film. It starts out as very cinematic. The opening scene, when we discover Colin in the wrecked living room of his home, is brilliantly intriguing. We have no idea what has happened and assume at first that he is the victim of a gangland attack. The introduction of the other characters is equally effective. Archie, who lives with his old mum, and particularly Meredith, first seen in his luxurious docklands apartment with a beautiful and totally naked young man lying stomach down on the sofa like a sculpture. It gives us a good idea visually both of their characters and of the London in which they live. The judicious use of flashback later takes us out of the setting of the decaying house, where Loverboy is held prisoner, and further into the characters, particularly Colin and his relationship with his wife. The film does though start to get a bit bogged down, when we go into the fantasy world inside Colin's head and his jealous obsession that other men, particularly Mal, are all after his wife, and one also then starts to suspect that maybe this was originally written as a play and the writers were so in love with the material they had written that they couldn't let it go. Whereas Johnny Ferguson, screenwriter of Gangster No 1, turned what was very much a piece of theatre into a particularly good and effective piece of cinema and Mellis and Scinto themselves, under the direction of Jonathan Glazer, used their writing skills cinematically in Sexy Beast , this begins to feel like a one set play that hasn't really been translated from its original medium. The resolution of the film and what causes Colin to make his final choice is also not really clear.
Having said that though, all the performances are very good indeed. Winstone is at the centre as the possessive, doting and now rejected husband, painfully torn apart by jealousy and rejection. McShane is particularly impressive as the elegantly dapper gay Meredith, Joanne Whalley by no means unsympathetic as the unfaithful wife, whose infidelity is kind of reasonable under the circumstances, and Hurt is a repulsive, comic delight as the foul mouthed Peanut. Despite the film's slightly uneasy structure, the performances all make the film well worth seeing, along with some of the most colourful and muscular dialogue to be heard in the cinema for a long time.
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