This is a quirky and highly eccentric film. 'Over the top' is an inadequate description. The sight of James Mason with a beard and a deep tan doing an Australian accent is eerie and unsettling. He does not sustain the accent very well, but he tries mightily. And once he even convincingly says: 'It's byute!' He is meant to be a famous Australian artist, and to convince us that he is in the correct milieu, he sits in front of a book about Sidney Nolan, and just to rub it in even further, 'Sid' and Arthur Boyd are mentioned on television. So the scene is set. But what Nolan and Boyd probably never did was go and live alone in a run-down shack on an island at the Great Barrier Reef in North Queensland, and paint a naked nymph. Not that they didn't fancy naked nymphs, it's just that, well, the Great Barrier Reef??? A hut??? Alone??? This may be what drew Mason to the project, since he and Michael Powell jointly produced it, and that means they were serious. Mason must have wanted a jolly good holiday in the sun, far from his austere Switzerland where he lived, and a naked girl cavorting around him also must have seemed just the thing. That naked girl is none other than Miss Mironov, better known as Helen Mirren, and she was aged 24 at the time. Over the years I have become exasperated at hearing all my male friends gasp with lust about Mironov. She never did anything for me, but I am in the extreme minority, indeed have often been met with expostulations of disbelief when I confessed my indifference. What was wrong with me? That is a question many people have speculated about, without coming to any sound conclusions. If being turned off by Mironov is a sign of something, then I plead guilty. But apart from that, she is of course a superb actress, and she even does very well in this role which could easily have been silly. Instead, she manages to be convincing. And that was not easy, as the story is in so many ways ridiculous. This was Michael Powell's last effort at directing, after which he passed beyond the Great Barrier Reef. The film may be feeble in countless ways, but it is genuinely amusing and its affectionate sending-up of the Ossies by portraying wildly caricatured Ossie types was very funny. Mason's friend Nat, played by Jack MacGowran, is as outré as a character actor can get, but nevertheless believable. He overacts so emphatically that he is simply hilarious. Yes, the film is engrossing in its own bizarre fashion. For the time it was meant to be highly erotic, and doubtless was, but in those days, things were simpler. Even the phrase 'age of consent' is no longer used. After all, now that girls of ten are routinely pregnant, what is the 'age of consent' any longer but a fig leaf to mask the hypocrisy of the older people who insist on believing that young people are still demure? Today, the idea of a 24 year-old girl running around naked on a beach would not be a bit unusual, or even a 17 year-old, which is the supposed age of Mironov's character. There is no use taking this film seriously, instead it should be viewed as a comedy which was never intended to be anything but a romp. There is also a very clever dog star named Godfrey who gets a whole single screen credit to himself. (That is how whimsical this film really is!) His best trick is to rush back to the hut and slip his neck back into his collar which is tied up so that when James Mason arrives home, he does not know that Godfrey has been running along the beach playing for hours and, like all the people in this film, romping like mad.
Review of Age of Consent
