You’re on a sun lounger. It’s beating down. Sweltering. But you can take the risk of overheating, because you could basically roll yourself into the pool and you definitely will. You’re on holiday. Well, it’s more than a holiday. It’s a retirement. You don’t know how many beers there are in the fridge, but you know they’re cold and there’s enough for that first beer – gone almost tasteless with chill – and your last, the one too many that doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to get up for – except more of the same – tomorrow. Your mind does a little idle swipe for some problem, some nagging thought to worry about, but your body pulls your mind back down to its slump and for a long time, longer than you can imagine, if you could be bothered imagining, your mind is as blank as the Andalusian sky.
One of the sad things (definitely not the saddest) about lockdown, especially if you’re furloughed, is how close and yet how painfully far it is from a holiday. Time to do the things you always said you’d get round to, that all the stuff of life usually intervenes in. But it’s very different to an actual holiday because you can never ease into that utter thoughtlessness, the exact same feeling that comes over you after the certification card fades away in the dark of the cinema.
All this to say, Sexy Beast (2000, streaming various places) is a holiday film, and not one of those ones that are about the irony of feeling awful when you’re supposed to be having The Most Fun (The Green Ray,Archipelago). It’s 88 minutes long, every scene has something visually appealing or stylistically impressive to delight in and it’s full of a lot of known actors doing fun things and bouncing their careers around for the heck of it. It’s a crime film that’s not really interested in a seedy underbelly: it never strays far from the Costa del Sol, Knightsbridge mansions and high-end London hotels. And it’s both very funny and About Something. The whole of the plot turns on pieces of luck – as though it’s travelling downstream on a lilo – starting with a rolling boulder nearly crushing our man of the sun-lounger. It’s a mark of the blessed life, the film’s belief in its characters’ right to good fortune, that even this talisman of doom turns out to be his ace in the hole.
Gal (Ray Winstone), a career criminal, has put himself thoroughly beyond the end titles of any other film, sitting with his trotters up with his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman) on the Costa del ‘Oliday. The hardest decision they’ve got to make is between calamari or ‘that chicken thing’ at the local tapas house. There’s just one little thing: the arrival of sociopath in short-sleeves Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), pulling him into an impossible heist back in sodden England. In any other story, it’s a shard of a narrative, a momentary blink of ‘Just when I think I’m out…’, an Ocean’s One. That’s not to say that Sexy Beast is a revisionist gangster film that makes the action irrelevant; the heist is still the destination, but we’re taken to it through the story of one man, and travelling with him on a human scale.
That human scale: one man saying, no, thank you and the other saying fuck off, yes. Don Logan sits in their place of ease like a laser-headed sentinel, ready to zap any small talk and incinerate it mid-air. So much of the film is focused on this battle of someone who doesn’t understand the notion of no and the other hoping that the plague will pass over his house. Part of what makes Sexy Beast a comfort watch for me is watching someone extremely intimidating from the protective gaze of the screen. This is not quite the pleasure in being terribly naughty that villains offer us, but more like seeing Hannibal Lecter behind a glass window. It’s a chance to feel the animal crackle of encounters with genuinely terrifying men, without the risk of being headbutted at the drop of a hat. Sometimes the only smart decision a film needs to make is casting, and setting Ben Kingsley on Ray Winstone is Sexy Beast’s masterstroke. Watching Winstone cowering against the formica from the much smaller man speaks endless volumes about his reputation. Like hitting a speed bag or spraying words as though from a wood chipper, Don’s speech patterns are relentless and aimed at ending conversation as quickly as possible, to return to the safety of silence. A mannerist extension of the Mockney argot that Lock, Stock… and its progeny made commonplace, it’s a natural fit for the ethnically ambiguous Kingsley, his set phrases sounding more like something he has heard secondhand without truly understanding the meaning of, but is able to fire a mile a minute at anyone who would challenge him on it.
There’s an underlying argument in the film about ease and acceptance, and action and repression. The film’s active gangsters have something to prove, but also something they refuse to face. The chain of the film’s events is put into action because Teddy (Ian McShane), the mastermind behind the whole operation, is attempting to win back face from Harry (James Fox), after a liaison at an orgy. To return what he views as a humiliation, he will take the entire contents of his ultra-high-security deposit boxes (without spoiling the film’s ending, even this reversal isn’t enough to wipe out the debt). Likewise, as the film progresses, we realise that Harry’s emissary Don has not selected Gal purely on his bank job bona fides: he covets Jackie (Julianne White), the girlfriend of Gal’s familiar and fellow ex-pat Aitch (Cavan Kendall, who sadly passed away before the film’s release). Don’s affair with her three years prior has awakened something Don is unwilling to face, something that is easy to miss in the pauseless hard man patter and over the loud Demis Roussos. ‘During what we was doin’ she’s tried to stick her finger up my bum I almost hit the roof you can imagine what do you make of that Gal what do you make of a woman who would want to do that?’ Gal merely looks on, absolutely terrified of the consequences of landing one way or another when Don is offering what qualifies as vulnerability. ‘Listen Gal, don’t say nothing keep this to yourself... but I quite like her.’ Taking a deep draught on his dripping gin and tonic, knowing he’s shown his hand more than he intended, he follows, ‘How is she, alright?’. Gal, not realising he has missed Don opening a door to himself that is otherwise clamped shut, misses the beat. ‘What’s that Don?’ ‘You heard.’ ‘No, I didn’t, sorry.’ ‘Yeah, well I’m not repeating it.’
Back at the villa, Don is awake in the small hours, shaving himself and turning the brutal enquiry upon himself (in a perfect and excruciating detail, he shaves against the grain, not even letting his follicles off with an easy ride). ‘You’re giving too much of yourself away mate fucking mouth.’ He cracks the door of Gal and DeeDee’s bedroom, furious to find them at rest. Working himself up further, he eventually runs into their bedroom, punching Gal as he takes the rest of the guiltless. It’s this calm, this acceptance he covets.
Once incredible menace and physical violence have failed, Don – whether as blackmail or plain cruelty – tries to put Gal in the same box of twisted recrimination by reminding him of DeeDee’s past as a porn star. ‘Dirty DeeDee... They’re still in demand these days those Super 16s She’s very popular What a stain on your life All the Persil in the world couldn’t shift it She’s disgusting.’ Gal, not in retreat from the past, just beyond it, replies, ‘I love her with all my heart.’ This kind of easy connection with emotion deserts Gal once he’s on the job, needing to be as sharp and unyielding as a diamond drill bit. Calling DeeDee the night before the job, they are back in old roles: speaking to him from a distant place where weakness will not be tolerated. DeeDee cannot risk even speaking to him. ‘I just want you to do one thing for me, just one’ says Gal, ‘Just say my name for me. Just once.’ Saying that contains all he needs to know.
All these glimmers of genuine emotion are served on a platter of delicious style. Sexy Beast was made during one of cinema’s periodic crime trends that give you a little flavour of what society wants to take a prurient sneaked look at, whether that’s spivs, thrill killers, serial murderers or football hooligans. The surprise hit of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, redeemed from straight-to-video purgatory unleashed a wave of imitators faster than you can say apples and pears. As long as you hit the marks (swearing, gunplay and dodginess) then you stood a good chance of getting a production deal. Jonathan Glazer’s twin careers in commercials and music videos – where being able to waft a puff of style into living rooms in less than thirty seconds can earn you a killing – made him an obvious candidate to move into film in the Scorsese-by-way-of-Loaded late ‘90s heyday. Certainly, this is a film with a great deal of undissolved style: quickly flipping through self-conscious day for night, process shots, underwater filming, extreme POVs, freeze frames and dream sequences of a demonic hare with one hand on your knackers. Somehow, it never feels like an extended Guinness advert or Jamiroquai music video. There’s a distinction between style of production design that shades into preciousness, and style of cinematography, which either lies with the material or runs against it (either of which approaches has their merit). This is a film about flashy people, and it’s entirely justifiable that they bathe themselves in coloured light, kiss floating underwater in the heavens or see themselves tearing down the highway an inch from the tarmac. The style is not a sticking plaster for other deficiencies, and it never overwhelms the material. It simply lets each moment float on to the next, thoughts sometimes bubbling up, other times not. Give yourself a turn on the lilo.
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Recommendations
Jonathan Glazer’s career is full of short delights if you want to take a dip. There’s these terrific Channel 4 idents; this less well-known Guinness ad that plays like an offcut from a frenetic Tarkovsky; and you can currently watch his very eerie, very elliptical short The Fall on MUBI. If I had to choose one, it’d be this rejected advert for Cadbury’s Flake that has Denis Lavant prancing as an operatic devil and encouraging women to ‘Succumb to the Crumb’.
Thinking about the British gangster film this week dredged up this incredible video of DVD commentary highlights from geezer cinema’s auteur Nick Love and his avatar Danny Dyer.
I liked this letter from Apichatpong Weerasethkul that imagines the lockdown leading to ‘Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-Liang, Lucrecia Martel, maybe Apichatpong and Pedro Costa… [becoming] millionaires from a surge of ticket sales. They would acquire new sunglasses and troops of security guards. They would buy mansions and cars and cigarette factories and stop making films.’
Betty Davis’s ‘They Say I’m Different’, part of a little favourite mini-genre of songs that are basically lists of things you like (see also ‘Losing My Edge’, ‘Sweet Soul Music’, ‘Hot Topic’ and ‘Renegades of Funk’). Hit me up if you have other examples.