Venus Roger Michell UK 2006
As a companion piece to director Roger Michell’s and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi’s The Mother, Venus simply can’t get it up. Unfortunately once past the comfortable acting it’s nowhere near as interesting or challenging as their previous collaboration. It’s about a May-to-November romance between an old actor (Peter O’Toole) and the teenage granddaughter Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) of one of his friends. But O’Toole’s character has all the sexual danger extracted from him by a convenient prostrate operation, medically rendering him impotent and thereby acceptable to any Daily Mail readers who might happen to watch the film. Fear not – there are no paedophiles here, merely chaste yearnings with the occasional sweaty fumble.
Contrast with O’Toole in the BBC television series Casanova, which had a similar relationship between an old man and a young woman. Although infirm O’Toole’s decrepit Casanova could potentially do something thereby preserving the danger and titillation. Alas in Venus he’s conveniently emasculated during the relationship probably to avoid any accusations of child abuse – which is precisely the grey area that makes it all interesting. Whilst in The Mother, Daniel Craig played a thirty-something in a loose relationship with a sixty something woman, the age gap in Venus is greater. O’Toole’s actor is older and Whittaker’s teenager is younger respectively. And they don’t even ‘do it’! It’s all rather disappointing making one wish that Michell and Kureishi had flashed their lecherous sides a little more.
O’Toole is great in this despite being ‘de-tooled’ and at times he comes close to being a geriatric sex symbol. Very few septuagenarians look quite so radiant as O’Toole with his ice-watery blue eyes and with considerable charm he actually makes it convincing that the old rogue could get away with what he does. For support he has the velvety Leslie Phillips as an actor friend, who’s a master-class in smoothness himself. Jodie Whitaker as Jessie also passes muster too, tolerating O’Toole’s characters advances and sportingly ‘growing’ from the experience.
Throughout the elderly actors complain about being typecast by their age, constantly playing death scenes. This is exactly what happens in Venus - O’Toole’s character dies. Why can’t old people be allowed to live in a film? Onto other crimes the soundtrack uses Corinne Bailey Rae (“Put your Records on”) way too much compounding the feeling that if the elderly and the young could have a relationship they might meet in some hell hole of a bar where it’s eternally happy hour to the chagrin of all concerned.
It’s not all doom and gloom as a trip to the theatre evidences. Jessie (and us) are clearly expecting something high brow only to find out it’s a play about teenager mums on council estates who say “cunt” constantly. There’s a message there somewhere.
