Winterbottom: The Look of Love (2013)

Pornography dates more than any other genre, so it’s a great vehicle for our current fetish for datedness, our fascination with anything that’s had the luxury of sinking into its own place in history. At least, that’s the attitude that Winterbottom takes in his latest film, a study of porn magnate and strip club entrepeneur Paul Raymond, played by Steve Coogan. At the time of his death in 2008, Raymond was the richest man in Britain, having amassed his fortune through a variety of porn enterprises that started with small burlesque shows in the 1950s, taking him into the Golden Age of cinematic and VHS porn in the 1970s and 1980s and out the other side. Given Winterbottom's focus on evoking the particular texture of each of these pornographic periods, it’s really only a biopic in the sense that Yankee Doodle Dandy or The Great Ziegfeld are biopics, as Raymond becomes the epicentre for all the minute ways in which pornography registers changes in taste and technology. That’s not quite to say that Coogan’s extraneous, or even secondary, but that he’s developed such a synergy with Winterbottom that he can slip in and out of the film’s ambience quite seamlessly. In fact, the film was as much Coogan’s project as Winterbottom’s – he’s got a knack for characters, like Raymond, who are introspective without being insightful – while Winterbottom’s direction often simply involves following Raymond’s direction, which appears to have been just as invisible, flexible and provisional, producing quite different styles of spectacle across his career. Different, but equally lush and luxurious, since Raymond was nothing if not a master of mise-en-scene, just as the film is a tribute to the art of pornographic ambience and set design, soft-focus backdrops that eroticise even the most mechanical performances, décor that cushions and sustains fantasy.