Gal's Costa del Sol idyll comes to an abrupt end
with the unexpected appearance of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a
seething torrent of hatred compressed in a muscle-bound body topped
by a jug-eared bald head so disproportionately large it makes him
look like a three-year-old, or maybe like Rumplestiltskin. Don has
been dispatched to Spain by big-time gangster Teddy Bass (Ian
McShane, who's most scary when he's flashing his dentures) to tell
Gal that he's needed in London to help his old friends pull a bank
job. The mission gives Logan the opportunity to terrorize Gal, his
adored wife Deedee (Amanda Redman), and their best friends, Aitch
(Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Julianne White). "I can't believe you
married dirty Deedee," says Don, shoving Gal's face in his wife's
porn-star past. No mere prude, Don is pathologically repressed. At a
particularly choice moment, he refers to his genitals as his "front
bottom."
Glazer, who started his career directing TV
commercials and music videos (MTV banned his video for U.N.K.L.E.'s
"Rabbit in Your Headlights," featuring Denis Lavant as an
unfortunate pedestrian in a tunnel), has a distinctive compositional
style. He often isolates an actor in the extreme foreground or
background of a shot, and he knows how to cut together odd-angled
images so that they have kinetic impact. The movie itself is
something of a sexy beast; it lures you in with a 10-minute opening
sequence that's sensuous and funny. There's Gal basking beside his
pool, his fleshy body all sweaty, the white mat on which he's lying
reflecting so much light you want to grab your sunglasses. On the
soundtrack, reggae gives way to rumba mixed with a throbbing techno
bass. Gal stands up, has a little chat with the pool boy, and just
when it seems like the plot will never kick in—and maybe that's OK—a
huge boulder tumbles down the steep hill behind his house, flies
over Gal's head, missing him by inches, and lands in the pool. The
boulder—a reminder that that you can't expect bliss to remain
unbroken—foreshadows Don's arrival.
What distinguishes Sexy Beast from the
recent rash of British gangster films is Glazer's investment in
character and performance. The film is exuberantly styled, but not
for the sake of style itself. Rather, the lush color and off-kilter
framing make you more aware of the characters' responses to the
world they inhabit; they let you understand that Gal is on the side
of life and Don is on the side of death. The two men go
head-to-head, with Don insisting that Gal participate in the bank
heist and Gal refusing. "Do it, do it, do it!" shouts Don, bobbing
his rigid torso forward and back, as if it were a plank he intended
to use to bash Gal's head. The actors, who clearly relish the
confrontation, are pretty evenly matched, but Kingsley has the more
showy role and the advantage of playing against type. The film goes
down a notch in intensity when he's offscreen.
For reasons of self-preservation, Gal decides to do
the job, but once Sexy Beast moves to London, the script runs
out of steam. In an attempt to jack up the drama, Glazer blows what
could have been a novel underwater heist by intercutting an
ultraviolent flashback showing how Gal, Deedee, and their friends
got their revenge on Don. It's a desperate tactic, and despite some
subtle acting by Winstone in subsequent scenes, the film never quite
recovers. Still, there are long stretches in Sexy Beast that
are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws. And how
could anyone resist a movie that uses Dean Martin's insinuating
cover of "Sway" for a finale?
Sexy
Beast
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto
Fox
Searchlight
12th Human Rights Watch
International Film Festival
Walter Reade
June 15 through 28
|
Now in its 12th year, the Human Rights Watch
International Film Festival is showcasing a jam-packed lineup of
films that deal with struggles for justice and freedom all over the
globe. Although they vary in cinematic sophistication, all are
eye-openers in terms of content, offering detailed firsthand
accounts of survival in such "trouble spots" as Jerusalem and
Kosovo. And although the Human Rights Watch is a refuge for films
considered too tough, too artless, or too specialized for
higher-profile festivals, let alone for commercial release, several
films in the series are slated for wider distribution. Among them
are Raoul Peck's Lumumba, an engrossing biopic of the
visionary African leader that features a towering performance by the
French stage actor Eriq Ebouaney, and Stephanie Black's Life and
Debt, a lively investigation of the adverse effects of economic
globalization on Jamaican workers, farmers, and civil servants.
The winner of this year's Nestor Almendros prize
for courageous and committed filmmaking, Jung (War): In the Land
of the Mujaheddin shows the destruction wrought on Afghanistan
by the Taliban regime. Filmmakers Alberto Vendemmiati, Fabrizio
Lazzaretti, and Giuseppe Pettito travel with a surgeon and a war
correspondent who are trying to set up a hospital, officially for
land-mine victims but in fact for all victims of violence. Crossing
a landscape that's strewn with the wreckage of 20 years of war
(before the CIA-aided Taliban takeover, the Russians ravaged the
country), the filmmakers come under fire from Taliban guns and
tanks, talk to maimed and terrorized children and adults, and try to
wrest some small hope from an almost unrelievedly grim situation. At
once intimate and epic, Jung makes Mohsen Makhmalbaf's
overpraised Cannes competition film Kandahar (about an Afghan
woman trying to rescue her suicidal sister) seem thin and contrived.
An outstanding American entry, Bestor Cram and Mike
Majoros's Unfinished Symphony revisits a historic protest
staged by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Lexington,
Massachusetts. To cap three days of marches and street theater, the
vets staged an illegal sleep-in on the site of the first battle of
the American Revolution. The filmmakers edit together footage of the
demonstration, on-the-spot interviews, and TV news coverage of the
war. Set to Henryk Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," the
collage retains something of its original impact, but distanced by
the music—and the passage of 30 years—it also takes on a haunting
quality. With the military-industrial complex once again poised to
run wild over the U.S. economy, these ghosts of protests past
couldn't be more relevant. A brief section of the film is devoted to
the Winter Soldier hearings, in which vets testified about acts they
came to view as atrocities, including the slaughter of innocent
Vietnamese villagers. (It puts the recent Bob Kerrey affair in
perspective.) Unfinished Symphony is politically potent as
long as the veterans' voices dominate. Unfortunately the film turns
mushy when the filmmakers attempt an overview. What could be more
lame than ending with "Give Peace a Chance."
Related articles:
Lenora Todaro's review
of Life and Debt.
Greg Tate's profile
of Life and Debt director Stephanie Black.
ike a middle-aged tomcat come in from the cold, Gary "Gal"
Dove (Ray Winstone), a former London gangster now retired to the
Spanish seaside, loves lying in the sun, scarfing down his calamari,
and rubbing his big body up against his mate for comfort and
excitement. Sexy Beast, the title of Jonathan Glazer's
immensely pleasurable, genre-defying first feature, goes straight to
the heart of Gal's appeal—which is inseparable from that of the
actor who embodies him. Gal is sexy, not because he's gorgeous or
powerful or narcissistic (if narcissism weren't sexy, Tom Cruise
would never be a movie star), but because he lives as beasts do,
tuned to his immediate sensory experience of the world. He has
animal magnetism. 