FeedAge of Consent
May 31 2009, 8:35pm
Helen Mirren's first film, and the last (or one of them, at least) for director Michael Powell. I'm not all that familiar with his work, so I'm sort of fascinated to learn that Scorsese & Coppola thought so highly of him that they brought him to the US in the late 70s (when he was in his 70s) and tried to singlehandedly resurrect his career. If nothing else, he wound up marrying longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker (when he was 79, and she was 44).
But I digress. It's an easy setup: world-famous Australian painter (James Mason, with a bushy beard) goes home to Australia for some R&R on a semi-deserted island off the Great Barrier Reef. Becomes enchanted by nubile young Helen Mirren, who is somewhere between naive-young-thing and wild-island-tomboy. Painter switches from blatant late-Matisse (the leaf cutouts) ripoff to sort of workmanlike artschool nudes-in-oil and declares that Mirren has helped him find his eyes again. Complications ensue, both of the plausible (her drunken crone of a grandmother, who objects to all the nude modeling on the beach) and implausible (some random "friend" of the painter who shows up uninvited & won't leave) variety.
It's all very silly, and yet somehow the combination of the elements (James Mason! Tropical island! Underwater reef photography! Naked 24-year-old Helen Mirren!) translates into a very pleasant 90-or-so minutes. No complaints whatsoever, except for perhaps the really creepy song over the closing credits: " . . . and now that you're reaching the age of consent . . . "
But I digress. It's an easy setup: world-famous Australian painter (James Mason, with a bushy beard) goes home to Australia for some R&R on a semi-deserted island off the Great Barrier Reef. Becomes enchanted by nubile young Helen Mirren, who is somewhere between naive-young-thing and wild-island-tomboy. Painter switches from blatant late-Matisse (the leaf cutouts) ripoff to sort of workmanlike artschool nudes-in-oil and declares that Mirren has helped him find his eyes again. Complications ensue, both of the plausible (her drunken crone of a grandmother, who objects to all the nude modeling on the beach) and implausible (some random "friend" of the painter who shows up uninvited & won't leave) variety.
It's all very silly, and yet somehow the combination of the elements (James Mason! Tropical island! Underwater reef photography! Naked 24-year-old Helen Mirren!) translates into a very pleasant 90-or-so minutes. No complaints whatsoever, except for perhaps the really creepy song over the closing credits: " . . . and now that you're reaching the age of consent . . . "
