KEY POINTS:
Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Peter O'Toole, Jodie Whittaker, Leslie Phillips, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Griffiths
Director: Roger Michell
Running time: 95 mins
Rating: M, contains offensive language and sexual themes
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: Zinger lines, wonderful performances and a profound emotional authenticity distinguish a film about the relationship between an old actor and a young woman.
Director Michell (who gave us the feeble-minded Notting Hill) and writer Hanif Kureishi have visited the subject of lust in the twilight years before, in 2003's bleak and brilliant The Mother. The emotional arc of this film is different, though; it's a redemption song really, about a man who has no right to expect the love he is looking for, particularly since he is looking in such an unlikely place.
O'Toole is Maurice Russell, a stage actor who was once, as he puts it, "a little famous". He now spends his days comparing medications and swapping affectionately bitchy jibes with fellow old trouper Ian (a deliciously cantankerous Phillips), occasionally picking up cameos as the corpse in a hospital soap. Behind the eyewatering profanity and great lines ("Oh, just kill them, kill the young, exterminate their disgusting happiness and hope.") we can hear the swan song of two men terrified of approaching death - the number of column inches devoted to old colleagues' obituaries is a favourite obsession.
When Ian's grandniece Jessie (Whittaker) arrives from the north, ostensibly to care for him, she turns out to be a foul-mouthed, self-centred bludger with improbable dreams of being a model, who makes Ian "scream for euthanasia". But in Maurice she excites an odd combination of feeling: there's a slightly creepy lust of course, but there's something more complicated, too. Maurice senses that the woman he soon starts calling Venus is a lifeline to his glorious youth. She, for entirely self-interested reasons, begins to play along with his slightly outre desires and from this odd, unco-operative liaison emerges something unfamiliar to both of them: friendship.
In an age of extreme sensitivity to the danger of sexual predation, Venus is a risky film: there are moments between the two that make us squirm, but they are always eerily authentic. Kureishi's dialogue is full of zinger lines ("Is that the end? Jessie asks during interval at a play Maurice takes her to; "It's never the end when you go to the theatre," he replies) and the performances are uniformly excellent - Griffiths as a third of a curmudgeonly trio deserves special mention as does Redgrave, as Maurice's ex, devoid of the self-pity to which she is entitled and the only person who truly understands him.
But it is finally O'Toole's triumph: mixing the self-mocking with the tragic - when he slaps himself on the face in the morning and demands that he "come on, old man!" it's almost heartbreaking - he crowns a brilliant career in a role in which one cannot imagine anyone else. Marvellous.
