VENUS: A Review

Last night’s movie was “Venus,” in which a tottering Peter O’Toole relates to a teenaged girl bluffing her way along because she really has no idea at all what’s going on. Her only source of nurturing seems to be Top Ramen noodles and beer. The main strategy of those in charge of her is rejection and attempted domination (quite useless). The O’Toole character (“Maurice”) is a sensualist. He loves this girl (“Jessie”) for her young peach of a body. Why would he love her mind? What mind?

The miracle is that Jessie, in spite of herself, begins to stir as Maurice escorts her through galleries, theatres, and ideas. In the end it’s fair exchange, a literal end that Maurice doesn’t face alone and for Jessie an end that is really a beginning. Maurice is ecstatic over the smell of Jessie’s neck, shamelessly avid for the sight of her golden and naked against pink sheets, but he never crosses whatever boundaries Jessie imposes, an entirely new experience for her and one she experiments with, concentrating, never offended by Maurice’s age, unlike most of the reviewers, who automatically consider old men obscene and offensive. (They never think of old women at all.)

This movie was written by Hanif Koreishi rather quickly, he explains, and was one of those scripts that just unfolded organically, partly through the casting. (I love watching these explanations afterwards.) The original idea was a sort of Brit grumpy old men inspired by the little coffee shop where a few geezers were regulars, but then they somehow became actors with those amazing Shakespeare and BBC repertory company backgrounds and overtones as rich as cello concertos. As much as they might grieve over lost powers (about the only parts left for them to play are corpses) they can glory in their pasts and the solidarity of the stage world. Every shot in this film is a potential Old Master painting: framed, composed, elegant and eloquent.

For me, this is a sort of been-there-done-that tale since my primary love affair was as a 21-year-old with a 47-year-old. It wasn’t quite the same thing because for a few brief years we were the same age, my powers on the rise and his in decline, but this film comes much closer to a true exchange than so many of the Woody Allen dirty-old-man formulations that ridicule and demean all concerned. One reviewer of “Amazing Aphrodite” thought Woody Allen was repulsively old at sixty. Allen is no O’Toole, but in real life at least one young woman didn’t find him that repulsive.

My personal reaction to this film (and what is not a personal reaction to a film when you watch a DVD alone with cats in your own front room?) is even more warm after watching the von Trier “Dancer in the Dark,” which is bleak to the point of unbearability. At the moment in various sources von Trier’s latest, “Antichrist,” is being discussed as over-the-top, too misogynistic to be taken seriously -- too ugly, too violent, too depression-obsessed, and too male-punishing-female for modern society. The NYTimes review is more dismissive than horrified reactions in Salon and Slate. It’s telling that two of von Trier’s former actress heroines have refused to be in any of his subsequent films.

So the “Scent of a Woman” tone of “Venus” is certainly welcome. It’s as though we’ve had to reach back to an earlier age to recover the ordinary erotics of daily life, instead of the constant attempt to be more shocking, darker, more gruesome, as a way to feel SOMETHING ANYTHING. But in the end the result of extremes is like the survivor of torture in “Rendition,” a near-zombie. All the torment blurs together and there is no enlightenment.

“Venus” is not in any sense misogynist, though it recognizes the hardship that erotic narcissism can impose on others. Vanessa Redgrave provides the counterbalance to the ignorant young girl and to the blithe greed of Maurice, who so often makes a fool of himself. Vanessa’s just as old, just as eloquent, just as wise, and quite forgiving, but she, as well as the girl, has a clear sense of boundaries and makes Maurice stay on his own side. Her comfort comes from cats. And he can forget seeing the children he deserted, though they are beyond grown-up. At Maurice’s inevitable funeral, the wife meets the young woman in a lovely scene. Now Vanessa is dressed in a black velvet turban and a smashing rooster tail feather collar, nearly Elizabethan, and she understands completely what has happened -- finds nothing requiring forgiveness, accepts the young woman as a protegee of her own. Jessie will be able to learn from that now.

The geezers of Valier mostly don’t have such rich pasts and the young women like Jessie will never give them the time of day unless they're relations. I passed one of these local beauties in the grocery store the other day, looking like a pole dancer with her long streaked hair, her tight jeans and high-heels, giving off the crocodilian aura of an opportunist. If an old guy had a lot of money, maybe they would give him the time of day. The hunger for money and status will soon take them out of here.

But why does von Trier always torture women that are more fawn than reptile? Is it a version of “crush” porn, the kind the Supreme Court is thinking about at the moment? Is there something about innocent devotion that makes the young irresistible to predators? And what allows these women to be abused? Society? The models they see in movies?

The name of the screenwriter, Hanif Koreishi, echoed for me Kent Haruf and his novel about two old rural bachelors who decide to shelter a young pregnant woman. I once got into a big argument over whether any old men ever do anything selfless or helpful, whether they aren’t always smelly beasts who must have their own way. I defended old men with the Haruf novel as my evidence. It could happen here. But that’s not the same thing as this film, which is a kind of mutual redemption, each person leading from strength and achieving in intimacy a mutual respect.