Venus Starring Peter O'Toole: A Lovely, Small Bittersweet Film

I recently had the opportunity to see Venus, a small British film staring Peter O'Toole as an aging actor engaged in an unlikely friendship and flirtation with a friend's young, lower-class niece. When the friend finds he can't stand the girl's poor behavior and utter unhelpfulness around the house (she's been sent by her mum ostensibly to look after him), Peter O'Toole's character befriends her and is at once horiffied by her crass behavior and charmed by her very ordinary, but very real beauty.

Getting her a job as an nude art model at a drawing school, he attempts satisfy his own desire for her while also giving her a chance to be admired in a less tawdry way then she would no doubt choose for herself. The bulk of the film alternates between scenes of hilarity between O'Toole's character and his other old actor friends, and moments of tension with the girl he's dubbed Venus as they negotiate if he may touch her hand, kiss her neck or see her nude.

With these themes, Venus could easily wander into a number of cliche's but doesn't. Instead Venus treats us to an interesting look at power dynamics based on age, gender, class, education and familiarity, and if you've ever worked in a profession where you are paid to be observed - i.e., as an actor or a model - you'll find Venus covers the utter lack of neat lines in such work with an honesty you might perhaps wish Venus had chosen to omit.

Venus is elegant, never explaining more than it has to, and realizing that human relations have categories far more complex and unnamed than merely "friend", "lover" or "family."

Towards the end of Venus, a waitress in a cafe where all the old men of the film hang out sees a picture of Peter O'Toole's character as a young man. "My God," she exclaims, "he was gorgeous." It's a stunning moment, because throughout Venus, there are moments of cinematography that do make you forget for a second just how hold he is now, and the constant push and pull of that reminder is one of the things that makes Venus so effective.

Venus also features great performances from Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Giffiths. Leslie Phillips and Cathryn Bradshaw.

A supremely human story, there's little reason to see Venus on the big screen other than to put yourself in an environment that demands you focus on it exclusively, which really, isn'y such a bad idea at all.