At the Movies: Venus
Venus, the new film directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, is not the soft and sweet movie promised by the trailer. I don't believe that a fully honest trailer would have done anything but unnecessary damage to this honest and beautiful film. After all, it's one thing to be lured by a spry Peter O'Toole to a movie about ageing and facing death, and quite another to be lured by ageing and facing death to see any movie whatsoever. In the second case, there isn't going to be much of a lure at all, and trailers are designed as lures. Sometimes the only alternative to a misleading trailer is no trailer at all - unthinkable. In the case of Venus, no harm was done.
Peter O'Toole, born in 1932, is not really an old man yet, so unless he has suffered a premature decline, his performance in Venus is a great piece of acting. At the beginning, Mr O'Toole's character, Maurice, is in somewhat better shape than his pal, Ian, also a elderly actor (Leslie Phillips, b. 1924), but in the middle of the story Maurice undergoes prostate surgery, and then insists on leaving the hospital before he has quite mended. Equally befuddling is his intoxication with Jessie (Jodi Whittaker), the daughter of Ian's niece, a girl who has ostensibly come down to London to take care of him. Ian, who doesn't seem to like women, can't bear Jessie once she arrives - and no wonder. She eats snacks and drinks beer (and stronger) more or less without interruption, a regime at odds with her objective of becoming a model - a conflict that the film declines to explore. Indeed, Venus does not take its title character (Jessie) very seriously. She is more flawed goddess - but then what goddess wasn't? - than real girl. Curiously, this approach works better than the alternative would have. Mr Michell and Mr Kureishi, by putting us in the place of an ageing man who knows that he's submitting to Eros for the last time, give Jessie an integrity that she mightn't have had otherwise. Maurice knows, and we know, that his interest in Jessie is essentially carnal, and when Jessie bats off his advances, demure as they are, we share Maurice's guilty knowledge that he is something of a vampire, feeding on Jessie's youth. Being a goddess, moreover, means that Jessie is not averse to well-behaved, strictly regulated adoration. A more ordinary young lady might be helplessly revolted by Maurice's attentions.
The early scenes of Venus are droll; there is almost nothing from the second half of the movie (as I recall) in the trailer. Ian is a fusspot, and given to elaborate exchanges of insults with Maurice, who, one gathers, always had the bigger career (he's still working). One suspects that it would kill Ian to laugh. The other two people in Maurice's life are sunnier but still very bracing. There's Donald (Richard Griffiths), who's very good at ego-deflation, and Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave), Maurice's ex-wife. Maurice and Valerie have arrived at being on good terms, but she never lets him forget what a shit he was to leave her, decades ago, with three children under six. He cannot deny that he always put his own pleasure first. At their last meeting, Valerie divines that Maurice is aflame again.
It's in the post-surgical scenes that Maurice falls apart. His decay is presented with the lightest of hands. All we need is a glimpse of his catheter bag to know how dreadfully his freedom and dignity have been compromised. There are a few crashes and breakages, but Maurice's condition is expressed primarily is slow, stiff movements, and facial expressions clouded by pain. Sometimes the scene is simply hard to read. Mr Michell favors underlighted sets in this picture, and he makes them work for him. There are gorgeous moments when Jessie's face appears to loom out from Vermeerian shadows. Maurice may be impotent and incontinent, but his longing for Jessie only burns more brightly.
The crisis occurs when Jessie tries to introduce her own proper boyfriend (Bronson Webb) into the picture. Actually, the boyfriend is anything but proper. He's a scowling man of few words who smokes a lot and affects disdain. In fact, he can't even provide Jessie with a place where they can be alone. So he has the bright idea of getting Jessie to ask Maurice for the loan of his flat - would he mind going for a long walk? Besieged by a chaotic chorus of voices from shows that he has done, Maurice returns to the flat perhaps a tad too soon, and one thing leads to another. This time, the crash is not funny at all, but a sickening, humiliating racket.
The last ten minutes of the film teeter between the predictable and the new, finally coming down on the side of the latter with a marvelously evocative scene that shows us just how much - and it's a lot - Jessie has learned from Maurice. It is the kind of learning that only a love affair, consummated or not, can confer. It is more than learning how to pose like the Rokeby Venus. It is learning to feel the erotic tides that surge through Velásquez's great painting, a masterpiece that, in its quirky, shambling, candid way, Venus lives up to.
