Venus

Colour, 35 mm
United Kingdom, 2006, 95 min
Section: Horizons

Synopsis

Actors Maurice and Ian have been friends for ages. Every day they have breakfast together in a cafe, they go to the theatre together, to the club together, on walks around London together. The serene life of the two seventy-year-olds is upset however by the arrival of Ian’s grandniece Jessie - instead of the nice household helper they had expected, the old man begins sharing his home with a taciturn and sulky fallen angel. Disappointed and annoyed, Ian asks Maurice to take care of Jessie and give her a tour around the big city. Between the girl and the man in his declining years, a tender, and nonetheless shocking, relationship begins to develop. “I’m interested in the way passion sustains itself throughout one’s life and may even return at the end in some odd, almost perverse way”, says director Roger Michell. The film is the product of the director’s third collaboration with screenwriter Hanif Kureishi; their latest film together, The Mother (2003) deals with a love affair between a widow and her own daughter’s partner. The main role in the story, which was inspired by Junichirô Tanizaki’s novel Diary of a Mad Old Man, is played by Peter O’Toole.

About the director

Roger Michell (b. 1957, Pretoria) was born in South Africa, and grew up in Syria and Czechoslovakia. He was educated at Cambridge. At the end of the 1970s he began working in the Royal Court Theatre and then worked for six years as a director in the Royal Shakespeare Company until he turned to television in the 1990s. There he made a name for himself thanks to the serial The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), created with screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and producer Kevin Loader. Michell’s next successful title was an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion (1995) followed by a television version of his own play run in the West End, My Night with Reg (1996). One of his greatest international successes was Notting Hill (1999). His filmography also includes Titanic Town (1998), Changing Lanes (2002), The Mother (2003), and Enduring Love (2004), which was screened at the KVIFF.