Malcolm Venville | 44 Inch Chest (2010)

Louis Mellis and David Scinto, writers of the formidable Sexy Beast (2000) [Director Jonathan Glazer] again collaborate. They have written the script for Malcolm Venville’s 44 Inch Chest (2010). The equally formidable talents of Ray Winston (Gary “Gal” Dove) and Ian McShane (Edward “Teddy” Bass) accompany them. This almost ensures the unreserved devotion to Chest of Beast lovers, which I must confess to be amongst. The opening scene of Chest is redolent of Beast. A corpulent and cadaverous Mr Winston [Colin Diamond] is portrayed lying in the wreckage of his sitting room. The scene is cleverly edited and includes a trembling lap dog below a cracked glass table, almost concealed in the thick white pile. The clever combination of images and music caused me to inflict a slight injury to myself. Violent laughter is a dangerous vice. Fortunately, by a combination of careful breathing and gentle massage I was able to recover and enjoy the film.

Mellis and Scinto appear to have written a tribute to the late Harold Pinter’s film legacy, in particular William Friedkin’s The Birthday Party (1968) and Peter Hall’s, The Homecoming (1973).
Onerous as it is to compare affectionate tributes with the deserving objects of devotion, I cannot help reflecting that the savage invective that has become fashionable in British film [see  Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) In The Loop (2009)] has done much to vitiate such important offerings. 

The joy of the short sharp imprecation is not a vice frequently enjoyed by Pinter; and films of his work remain powerful and shocking. It seems that what is gained in character realism, is inevitably lost in the complexity, grandeur, magic, absurdity and poetry of the spoken word, which is not a mistake that Pinter or Beckett would make, be his character car salesman, bog Irishman, baron or Emily Bronte blue stocking.

  Mellis and Scinto introduce a clever hint of Dennis Potter Surrealism. Joanne Whalley (Elizabeth “Liz” Diamond) immediately memorable as the pretty dream provoking Nurse Mills in Potter's The Singing Detective (1986) appears as a divine obscure object of desire, looking delicious in a little black cocktail dress; and also alludes to the complicated male fear of femininity discussed in the work of both Pinter and Potter.
Interesting to see that Melvil Poupaud [Loverboy] was cast as the English idea of The Frenchman. His cool performance in Francois Ozon’s Le Temps qui reste (2005)
as a fashion photographer "Romain", who has three months to live, was much in my mind as I watched his stoic performance. A luridly coloured Rolls Royce, Samson eyeless in Gaza and other playfully hallucinogenic sequences do much to enliven an otherwise somber, almost Jacobean, morality tale.