Once Laura confirms, with her own bit of subterfuge, that Hobbs is right about her future with the firm, or rather lack thereof, she is ready to use any means necessary to secure a future for herself with what Hobbs can spirit out one night in his battered old thermos. Does he feel a sense of empathy for her plight, a woman trying to buck the old boys network? Is she just the easy mark he needs by way of an accomplice to pull off the job? It doesn’t matter. His motives for involving Laura are deliciously ambiguous, though clues are dropped. Hobbs, you see, is a smart man whom fate and the class system in Britain has kept in the working class rather than letting him make his mark by moving up the ladder socially and economically. With unpretentious avuncular charm, and the subtlety of a con man at the top of his game, he gently reels Laura in, sealing the deal by telling her that she is about to be fired. She shows, and the film is, suitably enough, THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, about a London bank job that Hobbs likes well enough, except the part where they try to get away with it in broad daylight in the middle of London. In fact, he uses the last one to anonymously send Laura a ticket to the cinema. He has also been keeping all the encouraging notes that Laura writes to herself and then tears up and tosses into the trash. He’s the genial janitor who always has a smile and a good word for everyone as he empties the trash and waxes the marble floors, including the ones right outside London Di’s vault, where the world’s largest supply of diamonds is kept while being sorted, cut, and otherwise gotten ready for market. Her listener, a successful woman not yet thirty is fairly interested in using Laura’s story in the feature she is writing about the proto-women’s movement, but when Laura pulls out a bauble as big as a pigeon’s egg and nonchalantly says that she stole it from London Di, said journalist is riveted.Īs for the idea for the heist, that wasn’t Laura’s, but rather that of Mr. She also plugged along, coming up with brilliant strategies for working around and with the unruly political climate in South Africa, a country that London Di, as it is affectionately known, has been running like a fiefdom for decades as it exploits the people there with the same callousness as it does the diamond mines. She was regularly passed over for promotions in favor of younger, male-er co-workers, but she did keep a stiff upper lip. It’s told in flashback, as Laura (Moore in credible age makeup) tells the story to a reporter of her time almost fifty years before as the first female executive at London Diamond. The only thing we can be sure of as the story starts to unfold is that there is a heist, a ludicrously large diamond will go missing for 40 years or so, and so will Laura Quinn (Demi Moore). Cool and crisp direction by Michael Radford takes this caper flick and turns it into a minor classic of the genre. There are herrings aplenty here, red and other, courtesy of writer Edward Andersen, who has a knack for subverting audience expectations by neatly playing into them. FLAWLESS is a classy, smart, and fiendishly sly piece of filmmaking that keeps the audience on the edge of its seat.
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