Venus, if you will: Maurice (Peter O'Toole, left) and Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) get on famously in the Roger Michell film Venus. (Alliance Atlantis)
When novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi plays cupid, his star-crossed couplings flout taboos of race, gender, class and age. Think of the gay, white, working-class skinhead Kureishi paired with an ambitious Asian businessman – in Thatcher's England, no less – in Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). Or the thirtyish handyman he set up with a grandmother in her sixties in Roger Michell's The Mother (2004). Venus, the latest collaboration between Kureishi and Michell, is a kind of companion piece to the latter. Peter O'Toole plays Maurice, an aging Casanova and actor of some renown, who has taken to performing dying-grandfather roles for quick cash. His daily routine of cocktails and kibitzing with his fussy friend Ian (Leslie Phillips) is interrupted by the arrival of Ian's sullen, teenaged grandniece, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), who has come to London from the north to work. Maurice and Jessie fall into an unlikely and complicated friendship. He's drawn to her youthfulness and rough beauty, she to his sophistication and flattering attention. Kureishi's witty, intelligent script and Michell's fine, assured direction dignify and humanize what in lesser hands could be a one-note, dirty-old-man joke. As she reveals the depths hidden under her character's tough shell, Whittaker more than holds her own alongside a top-drawer cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Griffiths. But it's O'Toole's bravura performance that deserves the last word. Hollywood, please, give this seven-time nominee an Oscar.
Venus screens at TIFF on Sept. 11.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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