There was nothing in this year's Academy Award nominations that delighted me more than seeing The Zone of Interest up for so many big prizes. Jonathon Glazer has long been a firm favourite of mine, ever since he was spooking me with his freakish television ads for booze and banking, but he's a director who, up until now, has never garnered anything close to the recognition he's due. His work has long been defined by a boldness of vision, an eye for the uncanny, and above all an eclecticism - he has never made a feature that feels overly derivative of anything else in his filmography. But then, he hasn't made that many features, period. The Zone of Interest is only his fourth, and comes after a decade-long gap between his third film, Under The Skin. I am optimistic that the amount of praise and attention The Zone of Interest is receiving means that we won't have to wait nearly so long for his fifth. In celebration of its break-out success, I've decided to make 2024 the Year of Glazer. I have, in the history of this blog, covered a very limited selection of his adverts as part of my ongoing Horrifying Advertising Animals series, but it has long been my intention to delve more broadly into his work - his feature films, some of his non-horrifying animal advertising, maybe even one or two his music videos. We'll start with a loving overview his debut feature, Sexy Beast (2000), which might still honestly be my personal favourite of the four. Not because it's necessarily the most ambitious or technically impressive of his filmography, but because it remains the most enjoyable and easy to rewatch. It's the closest Glazer has come to making a "hangout film" (ie: one where getting to spend time with enticing and well-defined characters is the biggest draw), albeit one too deeply steeped in an aura of indeterminate horror for the characters to ever seem overly familiar, or like anything resembling good friends.
Sexy Beast is a picture of several enigmas. Not least among them, what the title is actually getting at. Neither the word "sexy" or "beast" is uttered anywhere within the dialogue, nor is it overtly obvious to which character, if any, it is alluding. It does not, presumably, denote our protagonist, Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), a retired London gangster living the dream life in a chic Spanish villa. His physique certainly dominates the screen as the title flashes across it, but the specific image with which it's juxtaposed, with emphasis on Gal's crotch bulging beneath his speedo, immediately sets him up as more of a figure of absurdity than a particularly persuasive or menacing one (coupled with the choice of opening song, "Peaches" by The Stranglers). Already he has the air of a man who has bitten off more than he can chew and doesn't yet know it. A more probable candidate might be the film's antagonist, Don Logan (Ben Kingsley, in an Academy Award nominated performance), who is certainly the most bestial participant - a man who throws his weight around by urinating on bathroom rugs and by barking obscenities repeatedly with the tenacity of a rabid dog. His is a transfixing presence, but not an especially charismatic or romantic one. It's hard to buy him as a "sexy beast". Some critics, such as Mark Dujsik, have suggested that the title refers less to any specific character than it does the enticement of the gangster lifestyle. Writes Dujsik: "The word "sexy" means primal just as much as it does attractive in this situation. This is a dangerous but alluring profession, and if you aren’t careful, it will get to you—even if you are the baddest of the bad." (Which, of course, Gal isn't.) If that was the intention, then the irony would be that Sexy Beast shows the profession from the perspective of a man who has long fallen out of love with it. Crime has presumably paid for Gal, by paying for luxury retirement, but it's a demon that he yearns to excise from himself, only to discover, throughout the course of the film that there is no escaping.
Heck, maybe the title refers to the film's outright strangest element - the shadowy, jeans-wearing anthropomorphic rabbit that pervades the darkest regions of Gal's psyche, intermittently showing up to point a gun in his face and be a general bad omen. The rabbit (sadly, I can't find an acting credit for the character) plays curiously like a direct precursor to Frank, the uncanny leporine who would haunt the titular character's visions in Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001) - but for the fact that this beast is such a mangy monstrosity that it makes Frank look like a cuddly theme park mascot by comparison. It's in the rabbit that I most see the shades of the characteristic freakiness that Glazer was always accustomed to bringing to his advertisements - the WTF-ness of the Dream Club squirrels combined with the unspeakable eeriness underpinning Samuel L Jackson's monologues. It's such a weird and compelling enigma. But is it sexy? Does it embody the notion on which the entire picture pivots?
There are two different angles from which I'm inclined to explain the presence of that rabbit. The first is that it's a twisted kind of tribute to Bugs Bunny. Which may seem ludicrous thing to insert into a gangster picture, but then the surreal touches in general seem to have been plucked straight out of a Looney Tunes short. Take the opening sequence, where we join a heavily-tanned Gal reclining by his swimming pool. A giant boulder suddenly detaches itself from the adjacent hillside and starts rolling in his direction, while Gal stands in total obliviousness. By a stroke of luck, the boulder just misses Gal and lands with a tranquillity-shattering splash within the pool. The incident is framed with the eye-popping intensity of a cartoon - one could imagine the very same thing happening to Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote. Then in the following sequence, when Gal is extolling the virtues of his Spanish abode while gazing adoringly at his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman), he blows smoke in her direction, which facetiously takes the shape of a heart. Such cartoonish elements add a distinctively playful edge to the film, establishing Sexy Beast as a gangster pic that's going to be as much fun as it is dark and gritty. But they are also clues as to the illusory nature of Gal's present existence. It seems a little detached from reality, and at the same time prone to strange and chaotic intrusions, reminiscent of a wonderful dream on the cusp of being corrupted into a nightmare. Sexy Beast opens with Gal assuming that he's already attained his happy ending, his life in Spain a blissful epilogue to a story he does not want to tell and is all-too eager to banish into oblivion. Here, he has it all - a swanky house in the Mediterranean, a wife he cherishes, the companionship of fellow ex-patriot Aitch (Cavan Kendall, in his final performance) and his wife Jackie (Julianne White), and even a budding son surrogate in Enrique (Alvaro Monje), a local teenager hired to do odd jobs around the villa. That is until Don, an unwelcome figure from that nebulous past, shows up at his door, his sights set on beleaguering Gal into rekindling his connections with the London underground and lending his expertise to the emptying of a bank vault.
Sexy Beast arrived a couple of years after Guy Ritchie revitalised interest in the London gangster picture with his own debut feature, Lock, Stock and two Smoking Barrels, itself a British answer to the Tarantino model that had popular culture so spellbound at the time. From the outset, it would be easy enough to dismiss Sexy Beast as a jump upon a bandwagon, yet as a crime film it defies expectations. The heist is far from the most compelling aspect of the narrative, and takes up little of the runtime. The really juicy elements arise from the psychological chills of the first two thirds, when Gal is having to entertain the house guest from Hell, a character who is intent on dragging Gal from his Costa del Sol paradise and back into the grimy, rain-soaked Hellscape of London. The script, written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, is structured on unspoken tension after unspoken tension; the sequences centred on Don's intrusion into Gal's sun-soaked world have the claustrophobia and intimacy of a stage play. His presence is enough to completely subvert the entire nature of the ostensible paradise. Don muses that Gal's villa is remote, indicating that he knows that Gal has travelled a long way in order to conceal himself from his prior connections. The very remoteness with which Gal has protected himself now becomes a stifling entrapment, when he is alone in the company of Don. Don's arrival visibly terrifies Gal's circle, and while we get only limited insight into what the man is fully capable of, we don't blame them for a second. Kinglsey's performance as Don is remarkably imposing. He isn't that big - physically, Gal and Aitch should be more than a match for Don, but the sheer ferocity with which Kingsley imbues the character makes it clear just how incredibly nasty things may get if those around him don't tread carefully. Yet for most of his visit, that nastiness manifests in Don's ability to confront them with the very demons they'd assumed they'd left behind on the English shore. He is a reminder that the sins of old must be accounted for, that the sinners will not be let off the hook through a mere change of address. It is not just Gal who has a lot of deeply uncomfortable baggage that surrounds him. Don announces his coming through a telephone call to Jackie, a move that confuses the others, until Don reveals to Gal that he and Jackie once had a sexual relationship, something that could potentially put a strain on her marriage to Aitch if he were ever to find out. DeeDee too has a salacious past that, according to Don, still lingers in the present - she is a former porn star, and we are told that her fan club still meets weekly for their ritual Wednesday Wank. Notably, Don's preferred tactic is to undermine the marital ties between the two central couples, something foreshadowed in the opening sequence, when the falling boulder fractures the motif in the swimming pool tiling of two hearts overlapping. The rabbit likewise makes its first appearance as Gal is anticipating Don's arrival, an occurrence that would appear to align Don with its grotesque enigmas. There is something about Don that seems almost supernaturally menacing. He could be the Devil himself...but for the fact that he also possesses an absurdity that marks him out as just as human and overwhelmed as everybody else. In this regard, we find a telling observation hidden away in the accompanying booklet to the DVD release The work of Jonathan Glazer, upon a scan of what I take to be authentic production notes, juxtaposed with concept sketches for the rabbit. As per these notes: "Gal embraces the universe. The sun. Animals. Sea. Don can't. Don feels diminished by its scale and order. Don has to feel paranoia. He has to hear the audience laughing at him." This idea is never more salient than during a sequence where Gal and Don are driving back from a bar in the nocturnal hours and encounter a goat on the road, which Don believes to be staring at him. Gal dismisses the animal as a "fucking nuisance", while Don seems to detect a greater purpose in the goat's gaze, a feeling that the universe is actively conspiring against him. In a subtle gag, the goat is not revealed to the viewer, and Don instead appears to look directly into the camera, breaking the first wall by commenting on the audience's voyeurism. It is as if he understands, on an intuitive level, that he is a spectacle to be gawked at, the butt of some cosmic joke. A goat merely looking in his direction presents a challenge, in being potentially in on something that he isn't, and this makes Don twitchy. As well it should. The goat is looking at Don because it knows he's going to die.
What makes Sexy Beast an uncanny experience, outside of Kinglsey's hair-raising performance, is the sense that there may be some greater force toying with Gal and company, always manifest in the natural world overlooking the villa. The sun is the very first image we see. As the production notes state, Gal embraces it, but the sun is perhaps not as benevolent as he assumes - through a slick visual trick, it appears to be what sets the falling boulder in motion, giving birth to the chain of events that indicate that his paradise is in jeopardy. Is it a matter of the characters being caught up in the perpetual chaos of the universe, or is something more sinister going on? I think it's as simple as the natural world signifying fate, the notion that the characters fundamentally have no control over where they are headed, and of course the inevitability of death. Which is the second meaning I'd ascribe to that rabbit. It echoes an early sequence where Gal, Aitch and Enrique attempt to assert their mastery over the world and fail spectacularly. The two grown men laugh at Enrique's thwarted efforts to shoot a hare in motion. Aitch then spots a runt of a rabbit nestled in the grasses and can't resist what he assumes will be an easy kill, telling the rabbit to prepare to meet its maker just before his gun disintegrates. The rabbit never budges an inch, as if it knows all along that Aitch is not to be seen as a threat. When the demonic rabbit surfaces in Gal's dream, it is a classic example of the hunter and the hunted reversed, although it seems noteworthy that Gal was the only one of the trio who is not seen attempting to fire his gun in the prior sequence. In fact, he objects to Aitch's eagerness to shoot the rabbit on the grounds that it's "only a little tiddler." What Gal empathises with, we suspect, is the rabbit's smallness in the scheme of things; his confrontations with the rabbit's nightmarish counterpart would indicate that the exact same is true for him. If the sun, the boulder and the goat all point to the inevitability of death, then the rabbit is a direct reflection of Gal's own mortality.
Which is a function also fulfilled by Don. He dies at Gal's villa, an outcome that paradoxically seals Gal's own fate. Paradoxically, because it is actually DeeDee, the personification of Gal's haven and the closest the film has to a moral centre, who pulls the trigger on Don (twice), as things boil over into a particularly ugly confrontation. Enrique appears, making a valiant stab at defending Gal, but also the ill-judged move of bringing a shotgun into the equation, which Don manages to pry away from him. DeeDee, who had the foresight to pick up a gun of her own, shoots Don pre-emptively in the stomach, before an incensed Gal is impelled to pulverise his mortally wounded form even further. Don's dying words are, ironically, words of affection - he looks in Jackie's direction and professes his love for her. An enraged Jackie walks over and joins Gal in the beating, while Aitch stands on the sidelines, silently piecing two and two together. Finally, DeeDee points the gun at Don and finishes him off. This might be considered a mercy killing, albeit one that's perhaps more geared toward sparing the characters the horrors of their own latent beasts than to ending Don's suffering. Don and DeeDee are diametrically opposed, each vying to keep Gal grounded in their respective domains, so it seems entirely fitting that she, and not Gal himself, should be the one to deliver the decisive blow. But it creates a new problem. After all, Don was only the messenger - he was there to recruit Gal's services on behalf of crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), whom Gal clearly fears as much, if not more so, than Don himself. Gal now has no option but to return to London and do the job, in the hope that Teddy will not suspect that Don's disappearance had anything to do with him. The mutual devotion between Gal and DeeDee may be the purest thing in the entire story, but it gives birth to the fresh new sin that Gal spends the remainder of the picture attempting to purge. His time in London is marked by different cleaning rituals - showering in a hotel room and of course the heist itself, which is carried out by drilling into the vault through a bath on the other side of the wall. Throughout the film, Gal is drawn to water, that classic symbol of cleansing. Much of his time in Spain is spent beside his swimming pool; clearly, there is a lot of unknown evil in Gal's past that he desires to wash away. His love for DeeDee gives him reassurance, some sense that he is not irredeemable. During a hellish dining reception in the London underworld, he sneaks away long enough to give her a telephone call, and to profess his devotion to her in a rambling and incoherent manner ("I love you like a rose loves rainwater, like a leopard loves his partner in the jungle..."). During this sequence DeeDee is shown entirely in silhouette and is mostly silent - the paradise she embodies is barely accessible to Gal, although a small token of affirmation, the utterance of his name, gives him a thread of hope that it is not irrecoverable.
I'm always intrigued by the fact that we never see anything of Gal's passage from Spain to the UK. We simply cut away abruptly from the scene outside his villa to find him underneath the grey London skies. His return to Spain at the end of the film is conveyed through an equally abrupt cut - one moment, Gal is standing beside an otherwise deserted bus stop in the dead of night, having been discarded by Teddy with a piddling £10 for his vault-cracking efforts, the next he's back in the warm embrace of the Mediterranean with the genial company of DeeDee, Aitch and Jackie. This is in contrast to Don's own travels, in which we actually see Don leaving the airport in Spain, and that squeamish episode from his aborted return flight to England (where Don causes a scene, gets arrested, and then claims to have been sexually assaulted in order to get out of trouble). I am reminded of Barton Fink, and how its lack of a clear transitional sequence showing the protagonist setting off for Hollywood has some questioning if he even leaves New York at all. The theory goes that Barton's Californian adventures represent some kind of fantasy vision playing out within Barton's head (I certainly suspect this to be the case for the scenes inside the Hotel Earle). In the same way, Gal's return to London seems to represent the jarring awakening from a dream, the dreariness of the city registering as a particularly harsh rebuke from reality next to the vibrancy of the Costa del Sol. Then at the end, when Gal finds himself cast out of Teddy's underworld, at least for now, he is permitted to retreat back into that dream. I am not proposing that the episodes in Spain are literal fantasies of Gal's, but that there is a deliberate sense of unreality to them that implicates the precariousness of Gal's escape; he could be plucked from his blissful haven at any moment.
On the surface, the conclusion of Sexy Beast would appear to uphold the notion that love conquers all. Not only does Gal make it back to DeeDee at the end of the film, he is even able to cheat Teddy's crew by secretly pocketing a pair of precious earrings during the heist and presenting them as a gift to DeeDee. We also see in the final scene that the hearts at the bottom of the swimming pool have been repaired. And yet it is precisely due to a lack of love that Gal even survives his return trip to London. For Teddy is not fooled by Gal. He makes it clear that the only reason he is allowing Gal to live, in spite of Don's damning disappearance, is that he ultimately did not value Don's life enough to consider him worth avenging. Don was right to be so paranoid about his place in the universe. The grim implication is that the exact same applies to Gal. Teddy makes his contempt for Gal known by paying him such a paltry sum for his efforts (not only does he pay him only £10, he gives Gal a £20 note and demands change) and abandoning him at the bus stop to make his own way to the airport. Gal is released on the basis that he also matters little in the scheme of things - if the outcome were reversed and Don had killed Gal, we suspect that he too would go unavenged. Teddy also makes the troubling remark that he might visit Spain himself in the future, with its implicit suggestion that he will potentially be calling on Gal's services again down the line. So we might question if Gal is even entirely off the hook. As he returns to his Paradise Regained there is a vague threat already hanging over it. As for those repaired hearts at the bottom of the pool, they now conceal a dark secret, for it is revealed at the end that Don's body lies buried underneath. The pool now seems to be less about cleansing Gal's sins than pretending they're not there, something that the characters are all cheerfully participating in. On the surface, Don's intrusion does not appear to have left too much of a stain on their lives. Aitch is telling Jackie about an experimental hair formula, with no hint of any lingering tension as a result of Don spewing his dirty laundry. Is this a testament to the strength of the relationship between Aitch and Jackie, something Don might have underestimated, or to their mutual willingness to bury the uncomfortable truths Don presents along with his murdered body?
Don, though, is not compliant in maintaining his silence. Even from his water-covered grave, he continues to undermine Gal, who acknowledges that Don technically did succeed in convincing him to do the job, but asserts, "You're dead. So shut up". The camera then dives under the pool and travel down a literal rabbit hole, where the demonic leporine is shown busting into a tomb and revealing Don to be very much alive within. This is the film's ultimate punchline - Don, the man who, up until now, might have passed for the Devil, suddenly becomes a twisted Christ figure, miraculously raised from the dead. All the same, the last laugh is conspicuously on Don, as he puffs passively on his cigarette, seemingly indifferent to the rabbit's intentions to rouse him. He does not look like a raging beast, ready to roar back to life and lay waste to everyone on the surface, but a dumbfounded individual who can barely take in anything around him. Gal's closing words are an attempt to reassert mastery over his situation, by insisting that Don is defeated and gone, but that final sequence, with Don and the rabbit both below him, and stirring, would imply that he will never truly be free of his demons. The blissfulness of the final arrangement around the poolside, while it pleases our desire for a triumphant outcome, seems improbable. After all the characters have been through, there is something deceptive in how they sit around discussing monkeys with Beatles haircuts and snickering as though nothing happened, as though they weren't confronted the unspeakable barbarism buried deep within their own psyches. The rabbit, as confoundingly surreal an image as it might be, is the very embodiment of reality, countering Gal's assertion by demonstrating that, no, Don is very much alive, even if the film cannot help but end on an image that revels in the absurdity of the character, as Don becomes once again the butt of a great cosmic joke. Somewhat facetiously, his resurrection underlines the inevitability of death; the rabbit reawakens him as a reminder to Gal that the issue of his own mortality is not one that he can sit on forever. One way or another, and whether or not his criminal credentials should come clawing back to the surface, he and the moth-eaten coney are destined to do business again.
In the meantime, we're left none the wiser as to the identity of that elusive sexy beast. Instead, the title comes to signify the abstract danger that hangs over the characters all throughout, undefined and omnipresent. Whatever form this beguiling beastie might take, it is seemingly as endemic in Gal's Costa del Sol paradise as it is in the grimy streets as London; Gal's narrative journey is in discovering just how little separation exists between the two. Not only do his historic demons encounter no difficulty tracking him down to his remote villa and infiltrating its grounds, the violent murder of Don, and Gal's part in it, prove that he was not successful in purging himself of their contaminants. Don's murder allows the cycle of brutality that Gal aspired to transcend to continue, and when he makes it back to his villa and life is apparently permitted to carry on as normal, Don's continued presence, albeit out of sight, presents a permanent blotch in his idyll. In the end, this may amount to nothing more dramatic than Gal having to accommodate his reignited awareness that he too must eventually die, and the precariousness of his place in the world. The prospect of procuring a happy ending that is not at the mercy of a fundamentally callous and chaotic universe is appealing, but leaves itself open to a dreadfully rude awakening.
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