Michael Powell (1969)
In his interview with Jo Botting ahead of last month’s BFI screening of Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), the actor Dimitri Andreas deplored the British film industry’s treatment of Michael Powell in the light of Peeping Tom (1960) and expressed regret that Powell, virtually banished from Britain, ‘went to Australia and did that terrible film’. I guessed Andreas was referring to They’re a Weird Mob (1966), the first of two pictures that Powell made down under in the second half of the 1960s, though I didn’t know either of them (and still won’t know They’re a Weird Mob by the end of BFI’s current Powell and Pressburger season). The other film, Age of Consent, was a box-office hit in Australia at the time of its release and its critical cachet has increased over the years, thanks to a combination of its authorship and its theme. Michael Powell is now widely regarded as a great director and this was his last feature-length film; its main character is, as its maker was at the time, a creative artist in his sixties, engaged in a kind of artistic self-reappraisal. But I have to say I think Age of Consent is mostly terrible, too.
Abstract artist Bradley Morahan (James Mason), jaded by international success, feels the need to get back to his Australian roots. Returning from America, he moves into a shack on a small island on the Great Barrier Reef. He meets a local girl, Cora Ryan (Helen Mirren) – voluptuous, strong-willed, a force of nature but still under the thumb of the cussed, gin-sodden grandmother (Neva Carr Glyn) that raised her. Morahan pays Cora – who’s saving up to realise her dream of moving to Brisbane and training as a hairdresser – to be his model and she soon becomes his muse. Morahan’s paintings of her, in which Cora is usually naked, are figurative rather than abstract, reflecting the style as well as the strongly anti-modernist views of the artist and writer Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), on whose semi-autobiographical novel of the same name Powell’s film is based. Despite his antipathy to modern art, Lindsay was avant-garde in his personal life and the novel Age of Consent reflects this: the middle-aged artist in it, on a trip to a rural area, meets an adolescent girl who serves as his model and becomes his lover. The book was first published in 1938 though not (says Wikipedia) in Australia, where it remained on a list of banned works until 1962.
An early scene in the film sees Morahan hanging around a New York City gallery where his work is on display and for sale. He watches what goes on there, unrecognised by prospective buyers whose crass consumerism makes him wince: the acting of the bit players – art dealer Godfrey (Frank Thring) and his gallery customers (Peggy Cass and Hudson Frausset) – is so crude that you start to wonder if James Mason is responding to this rather than to moneyed philistinism. Mason is required to wince so often that even his acting has become hard to watch by the time Powell eventually gets away from the gallery and disillusioned Morahan from New York. Things don’t improve much in Oz, though. There Mason is surrounded by one-note overacting from Neva Carr Glyn as Cora’s granny, Andonia Katsaros as the artist’s gauche spinster neighbour and, worst of all, Jack MacGowran (renowned Samuel Beckett interpreter!) as Morahan’s sponger pal, whose arrival on the island interrupts the protagonist’s artistic rebirth. Even Morahan’s likeable dog (named for Godfrey the art dealer) seems hyper-trained.
These contributions might not matter if the broad comedy were confined to the margins of Age of Consent but the supposedly funny bits occupy so much screen time that they threaten to take over – and certainly distract badly from what should be the main story. The BFI handout was a 2005 piece by Jeanette Hoorn, which claims that Morahan emerges as ‘a radical, a painter in full rebellion against the aesthetic values of the day’ and that this ‘arguably reflects Powell’s own experience of working against the prevalent grain of critical acceptability …’ Jeanette Hoorn is a film scholar and this assertion is decidedly academic – justifiable by reading Michael Powell’s biography onto events occurring in the course of the narrative but not at all what you get from watching the film. Peter Yeldham’s screenplay updates the action from the 1930s of Norman Lindsay’s book to the 1960s and Powell exploits the increasing relaxation of cinema censorship in the latter decade, chiefly in sequences where Helen Mirren is nude. Yet the chasteness of the artist-model relationship in the film, with only a hint in the closing scene that this could change, is not only more timid than Lindsay’s storyline sounds to be but also detracts from Morahan’s complexity. The age difference between the two main characters, with James Mason as the senior partner, might seem to guarantee that Morahan’s involvement with Cora will evoke thoughts of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) though it didn’t for this viewer. The artist’s responsible, professional attitude towards his model – he can vehemently, truthfully deny her maniacal grandmother’s accusations of impropriety – makes the male-gazing Age of Consent a bit easier for present-day audiences to take. It also attenuates the libertine side of the artist’s character without substituting anything else much.
As a result, James Mason’s portrait of Morahan is frustratingly limited. Besides, he has to devote too much time to firefighting pantomime incidents (and performances) and only occasionally even tries for an Australian accent before quickly thinking better of it. (It would be nice to feel this reflects how far away from his true self Bradley Morahan has grown but I can’t.) Even so, Mason’s presence and physicality are one of three elements which ensure that Age of Consent isn’t a complete write-off. Another is the visual allure of the locale, which Powell’s DP Hannes Staudinger makes the most of, especially in his underwater cinematography. The third is Helen Mirren in her first lead film role. The young boatman Ted (Harold Hopkins), who carries a torch for Cora, tells Morahan that locals tend to dismiss her as her mother’s daughter; the mother, he explains, was known as ‘the town bike’ because ‘anyone could ride her’. Ted’s convinced that Cora’s more than that – and Mirren is much more than how she is used in the role. She was no doubt too sophisticated, even in her early twenties, to be ideally cast as ‘child of nature’ Cora but Mirren’s ability to create character and the beauty of her body combine to make the girl impressionable and powerful at the same time. You can see why this actress got more work.
27 December 2023
