The Look of Love explores the career of British porn entrepreneur Paul Raymond

PAUL RAYMOND IS PROBABLY not a name familiar to many people outside Britain. But there was a time when this self-made man was an ever-present fixture in the British tabloids. The so-called King of Soho dominated London's famous red-light district in the 1970s and '80s - his iconic Raymond Revuebar, with its fully nude cabaret, was a landmark in the area.

Factor in the success of his soft-core pornographic magazine
Men Only and it formed the basis for a property and publishing empire that, by 1992, saw
The Sunday Times dub him "the richest man in Britain".

Still, the UK-centric nature of the subject means it is something of a risk for director Michael Winterbottom and actor-comedian Steve Coogan to make the erotica entrepreneur the subject of a film,
The Look of Love. "Obviously, it is an English film about someone who is well known in English culture," the director says. "But we hope people can understand it, wherever they are."

Sex sells in any language, of course, but
The
Look of Love is about more than just titillation. It's equally a portrait of post-war Britain and its shifting sexual mores, for which Raymond was partially responsible.

"He's an interesting character because, in some ways, he's very British, and in other ways he's a thorn in the side of the establishment," says Coogan. "But this didn't happen because he consciously pursued maverick status; he was a businessman, who tapped into a hunger for some sort of visceral, exciting, overtly sexual entertainment. When you look at things culturally, any kind of display of sexuality [in Britain] was seen as hedonistic and undesirable, as if it had to be rationed along with fresh vegetables and chicken. The British have always had a peculiar attitude to sex."

A former cabaret entertainer and ventriloquist, Raymond established his Raymond Revuebar in 1958, just at the moment that, as Coogan puts it, "Britain seemed to go from black and white to a world of colour". Raymond's
Men Only magazine, launched in 1971, became a sensation when he pushed for increasingly explicit images.

But could Raymond have flourished today, in an age when the internet allows 24/7 access to pornography? "Probably not," admits Coogan. "I don't think he would have. He was part of the zeitgeist, of an environment which was changing. I think that he flourished because he arrived when things were at a crossroads. He caught the wave before it gathered momentum."

It was Coogan who went to Winterbottom with the idea of doing a film about Raymond. Like most British people of a certain age, Winterbottom, 52, was aware of Raymond's empire, but knew little about the man behind it. So what intrigued him?

"Paul Raymond had an incredibly colourful life," the filmmaker explains. "A long life, a long career, lots of ups and downs. I like those picaresque novels of the 18th century like
Moll Flanders, where you have characters who are amoral, and they have a series of adventures; they make money, they lose money. He had that kind of life."

It's not the first 18th century literary riff Coogan and Winterbottom have attempted. They worked together on 2005's
Tristram Shandy: A Cock
and Bull Story, which borrowed from 18th century writer-clergyman Laurence Sterne's novel,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

But the Paul Raymond biopic feels closer to their first collaboration, 2002's
24 Hour Party People, which like
The Look of Love followed a single protagonist, Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, through a series of misadventures.

"What made this more tricky than
24 Hour Party People is that I love Factory Records, I love [Manchester club] The Hacienda, I love Tony Wilson. But none of that is true about Paul Raymond or the Raymond Revuebar or
Men Only magazine. It's his world, but it's not a world where we'd say, 'This is a brilliant world.'" Rather, this is a universe that implodes over time. "You see the club get seedier, the magazine get more explicit, and his world gets more jaded, and more unpleasant," the director says.

There are what Winterbottom calls "surface connections" between Coogan, Wilson and Raymond, who were all Catholic-raised lads from the north of England. But Coogan is swift to distance himself from the Liverpool-born Raymond, who died in 2008 at the age of 82. "I don't feel an affinity with him. I felt more of an affinity with Tony Wilson," Coogan says. "I just thought Paul Raymond was an interesting character in a story I was surprised no one had told."

The film leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether Raymond was a taboo-breaking pioneer or merely an opportunist with dinosaur attitudes. The glittering surface is all cocaine, champagne and lashings of nudity.

"That's thrilling at first, but then it just becomes mechanical," says Coogan, of the latter. "In the end, it becomes very un-sexual. You become inured to it. Because it was very claustrophobic - we were in interiors a lot, in the club and his house. It was very closed-in. You felt like you wanted air and space when you finished filming, because it was so intense."

The Look of Love gets its emotional heft from Raymond's relationships - with wife Jean (played by Anna Friel), daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots), and lover Julia (Tamsin Egerton), whom Raymond reinvented as
X-rated star Fiona Richmond.

"Women dominated his life, and that's reflected in the film," says Coogan. "Whether he was celebrating sexuality or exploiting women or consuming them, this avaricious consumption was part of his hedonistic consumption of life."

As for the film's location, it was difficult to portray four decades of life in a changing Soho. "That was a nightmare," says Winterbottom, who shot in storied Soho venues such as Ronnie Scott's. At least the tone of the area has remained, he says. "There's always been a mixture of film business, seedy sex, cheap shops and glamorous bars. It's just that men like Paul Raymond no longer belong there."

48hours@scmp.com

The Look of Love
opens on August 29