Film - Jonathan Romney has the last word on the geezer-gangster flick
So soon after the turkey-roasting season, the opening of Sexy Beast comes as something of a shock. There's Ray Winstone lying by the pool, basting - there's no other word for it - in the Spanish sun, oozing tanning oil and contentment. He's a big man, but he's out of shape, as they say in British gangster films. The film's funniest, cruellest moment follows, as the image freeze-frames on Winstone's lower half - raised leg and wobbling bollocks in yellow Man-From-Atlantis trunks, to the sound of the Stranglers lumbering lad-reggae anthem "Peaches".
Jonathan Glazer's film is a classy and always surprising late entry in the Brit-crime cycle, a genre that you might have thought had had its day. Last year's Gangster No 1 was a bold but doomed attempt to squeeze a final few gallons of blood out of British mob imagery before it ossified for keeps into Guy Ritchie's sub-Damon Runyon cartoonery. But Sexy Beast puts an imaginative new spin on its telling, often troubling picture of hard men and soft bellies.
The screenwriters, David Scinto and Louis Mellis - they wrote the play that Gangster No 1 was based on - have devised a story that is simple yet rather ungainly in structure. Sexy Beast feels more like two films shoehorned together with bizarre visuals and odd flashback tricks for cement. The second half's flamboyantly unusual heist seems almost an annexe to a brilliantly taut and concentrated first half, which answers the question of what happens to English gangsters once they find their dream life on the Costa. Gal (Winstone) has done his time inside and now lives in Spain with his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman), a former porn star. Days of sun, nights of calamari - who is to say it's not heaven on earth?
Then in comes a face from the past - Don Logan, his name to be whispered like a malevolent spell. Don wants Gal to come out of retirement: there's a job in London for the man behind the man behind the man. The crime world, it is neatly demonstrated, is a long chain of command, one feared fixer behind another until you get to "Mr Black Magic" himself - here, played by Ian McShane, fresh from being a smoothie Satan on stage in The Witches of Eastwick.
The Spanish sequences briskly play Gal's nervous, gone-to-seed hedonism against Logan's brutality. At first, you think Winstone's slobbishness, here tender rather than menacing, is going to walk away with the film. Then Sexy Beast hits us with the unexpected. Ben Kingsley - yes, mild, saintly Ben Kingsley from Gandhi, Turtle Diary and the rest - is chilling the moment he walks on in his crisp short-sleeved shirt. His physical presence is a gift: faintly disgusted gimlet eyes, shaven skull that's half vulture, half nastily tumescent prick, and fury stored up in his tight-sprung neck. Logan is like a dam for malevolence - once this archetypal silent psycho starts talking, it's like a blast of icy water. Out pour enraged sergeant-major barrages of yesses and nos; out comes, in a cool, offended monotone, a distressingly funny improvised routine at a Spanish airport.
In the Spanish section, the drama has an authentically Pinterish ring that the rest of the film can't quite match. The bank job seems over too quickly, as if any longer would stretch credulity. But Glazer very smartly flaunts the cliches and references, lets us know that he is playing with the genre, as if to say that this really is its last word. The heist harks back to the 1960s heyday of the caper flick: James Fox's languid cameo in an orgy scene gives the nod to Performance; and the Costa del Crime setting is presumably a conscious echo of Stephen Frears's The Hit. It is by no means certain whether this is largely fancy trimming, rather than a deliberate reckoning with the genre, but, at the very least, it adds a veneer of knowing class.
There's so much going on in Sexy Beast, so many one-off ideas and bits of business, that much of it remains surface effect rather than coalescing into themes: the sexual bond between Mr Big and his target, suggested in one brutally salacious sequence of shots; Gal's loosely sketched paternal relationship with a young Spanish boy; and nemesis in the form of a nightmare rabbit-creature, the one element that really fits awkwardly. Surrealism is superfluous here: the human tensions and terrors are precise enough. And, flimsy as it is, the film's bedrock is the love between Gal and Deedee - the unconditional mutual passion and tenderness, told more in looks and gestures than words. They have both been through hell and have made each other happier; who would have thought that this kind of story would have a convincing love-conquers-all subtext?
Sexy Beast is the first feature by a major director of TV commercials (Glazer made the famous Guinness "running horses" ad), but it's not what usually gets disparaged as an "adman's film". Glazer loves his editing tricks, his soundtrack throbs and his swanky scenarios - only a commercials veteran would attempt this much underwater photography on a first feature. But Glazer puts his real resources into the acting, into the tensions between the characters. Ungainly as it is, Sexy Beast has more subtlety, imagination and sheer bravado than most new British films. Guy Ritchie fans may well relish it, even while it tugs the stuffing out of the hard-man myths. But it would be nice to think that Sexy Beast might be the last word on the geezer-gangster flick. Like Gal, the genre has earned its retirement.
Sexy Beast (18) is released on 12 January at the Warner West End and UGC Haymarket
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
