Sexy Beast
Sexy Beast (2000)
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Actors: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane
Synopsis: Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) is a retired British gangster, living out a low-key existence in sunny Spain with his wife. The psychotic Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) is sent to bring Gal back to London for a daring heist, but the clash between Gal’s wish to be left alone and Don’s maniac fervour leads to a tense showdown between the pair…
Review: In anticipation of the much trumpeted Under the Skin, I decided to revisit Jonathan Glazer’s first feature film, Sexy Beast, to get myself in the mood for the main event….
In many respects, Sexy Beast is quite a slippery film – it’s very slight and probably if it had run any longer than its breezy 85 minutes, one senses Glazer’s glitzy and image-centric approach to storytelling might have begun to crack at the seams. Instead, what we have here is almost an extended short film par excellence, and we’re permitted to luxuriate in Glazer’s skills – he’s a great ambience maker both sonically and pictorally. Sexy Beast also features a riotous sense of humour, has a plausible undertow of pathos for its central character Gal, and makes great mileage out of its contrast between the crisp open spaces and baking air of Spain to the dank, claustrophobic climes of London.
Of course, let’s not overlook probably the best thing about Sexy Beast, and that is Ben Kingsley’s incredible turn as psychotic-schizophrenic Don Logan. Kingsley commits to his characterisation the proverbial ‘a hundred and ten percent’ and delivers a bravura performance both from the inside and outside – from the implacable stiffness of the man’s posture, to his monotonic, nasal cockney twang as he lingers over his ‘dark Ls’, to the depraved violent, misogynistic rage which betrays all his psychoses. (April 2013)
