Venus (2005)

Some films are creepy and beautiful and funny. Venus (dir. Roger Michell) is an example. Peter O'toole is the actor who can't get women out of his mind. His craving for women is obsessive and self-indulgent: he'd do anything for a moment of attention by a good-looking female. His gay actor friend has sent for a relative to take care of some chores in the household. He imagines that the young lady will prepare grand food for him and discuss Edith Wharton when she is not making him dinner. When she arrives, this fancy evaporates. She is more interested in eating crisps and going out for parties. Peter O'Toole's womanizer of course makes advances, and she goes along with it, as a sort of play-act, a game in which they both win.

This film could be truly horrible. All characters are self-obsessed but at the same time, they are interpreted with a sort of tenderness that focuses on the way life bends in unexpected directions. What I liked about the film was perhaps that it examines old age with little sentimentality, but it is not cynical either. It shows how people change all the time, also after they turn 70, but that no person will change from an asshole into an angel, that self-indulgence does not go away magically only to be exchanged for a clear vision of life.

Peter O'Toole is marvellous and so are the other actors, especially Leslie Phillips who plays O'Tool's pal. In one touching scene, we see the two men dancing togehter in, I think, a quite desolate-looking church. Even though both men are rather unsympathetic, we immediately understand that their friendship and love is deep. One aspect of Venus that caught my attention was how embodied these elderly men were, and how rare it is in films that men have a multi-dimensional bodily presence (action heroes with their bulging muscles - no). The weakest part of the film is how the girl is presented. We learn that she relates to Maurice in a way that oscillates between pity, manipulation and tenderness. But still, she is trapped in the way Maurice sees her and she doesn't really get an independent position - she remains the woman who struggles against the man, sometime humoring him, sometimes playing with him. At the same time that gender kept being blurry here (the film does not go along with the image that womanizers 'love women - a lot') there was still something fishy here.