Owned version: The 2015 "45th Anniversary Series" DVD released by budget-disc kings Mill Creek Entertainment.
Acquired: June 25th, 2017 from Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
Or, This Deserted Island Wasn't Deserted Enough.
Age of Consent centers around James Mason as a creatively frustrated painter who moves to a tiny island off the coast of Australia in search of solitude; instead, he finds a lively and pulchritudinous teenager played by a debuting Helen Mirren, and a lengthy tete-a-tete begins to develop. As the title implies, Mirren is suggested to be underage (though she seems to have no knowledge of her age, and the one character who repeatedly insists she's too youthful has good reason to keep her believing so); her side of the narrative, then, chiefly involves her own growing sense of autonomy. Indeed, the film uses a series of visual metaphors to suggest that both characters are prisoners in their own lives, from the opening credit sequence revealed to be a fishtank in which a watch is suspended as a form of advertisement to an early shot of Mason in bed with a woman shot through the headboard so as to suggest prison bars to the first meeting between Mason and Mirren - a negotiation on the price of fresh seafood caught by Mirren - arranged so that Mirren is trapped by the front door frame of Mason's beach hovel. So I guess it's ironic that the film ultimately gets imprisoned by the necessary compromises of its screenplay.
Consent, the last theatrical release of the legendary Michael Powell, had the potential to be a rough-hewn gem if it had stuck with the Mason/Mirren dynamic, if it had been possible to pare it down to a two-hander. Mason takes his natural unctuousness and tweaks it enough so that the smarm turns into a wince, the oblivious defense of a man intensely discomfited by the presence of others - he's the kind of guy you can totally see buggering off to some isolated paradise in hopes that the cessation of noise will stoke his waning muse. Mirren, meanwhile, is coded as Nature Girl, the wild animal instinct to Mason's artistic rationality; she's introduced literally emerging from under a dock as though the sea just spat her forth, and her wide-brimmed sunhat stays on even when she dives back into the ocean to escape detection by Mason's dog. (In this light, Mirren's legs and armpits going unshaven is a perfect and necessary touch.) As such, there's a base satisfaction in seeing these two find someone who can give them what they need - Mason gets a model, someone to put a spark of life back into his art, and Mirren gets an adult who will see her and treat her (to a degree) as a fellow adult. Powell's direction is unsurprisingly gorgeous - beyond the nuanced central performances, the editing is crisp and clever (and painful when necessary, e.g. the violent cut when a nude Mirren gets hit across the back with a switch) and the colors pop even on this disc's drab garbage transfer, with sparkling oceanic blues and lush overgrown greens providing contrast to the cool relaxing blacks (for shadowy exteriors) and browns (for interiors). There's even some lovely underwater photography, a fluid accoutrement that takes full advantage of the allowed access to the Great Barrier Reef (even if Mirren's big nude underwater swim is shot, due to necessary adherence to censorial codes, exactly like a nudist-camp movie). The surf-and-sand setting, the beautiful bohemian surroundings with the preponderance of natural color, makes the occasional splash of the artificial that much more impactful; while there's nothing on the level of the berserk use of the red dress in Black Narcissus, the discovery of Mirren's secret money stash - her ticket to a life off the island and thus true freedom! - by her drunken avaricious aunt is given an extra frisson by the pointed contrast of a hot pink handbag tossed on top of moss and rock, screaming the defilement of this secret place to the woods around it.
That drunken aunt, though, is indicative of the crippling problem with Age of Consent - namely that there's other people in it. Every time Powell has to drag in another character, the film loses its bearings; it's a delicate back-and-forth into which a goddamn Carry On film keeps poking its snout. There's the aunt, an unintelligible screech machine. There's the young man who runs the ferry between the island and the mainland, a lean himbo whose big scene is one where he unsuccessfully attempts to force himself on Mirren. (This scene, truth be told, isn't a complete botch - it's mostly about the young man's awkward nervousness, which is both an interesting way to defuse any potential ugliness and an interesting way to play with a completely different vague sort of ugliness.) There's Mason's neighbor, a female chicken farmer whose sole character trait is that she really, really badly wants some dick. And there's Mason's friend/agent, a licentious mainlander who spends the majority of his screen time talking about banging beautiful women and steals a wad of cash from Mason so that the plot will have somewhere to go in its last half-hour. The last two get dovetailed in quick plot thread about the two of them meeting for dinner, culminating in a baffling and tasteless joke where the agent declares he's been raped. If it happens to Mirren, it's uncool, but when it happens to this jerkwad it's a larf. Yeah, sure, whatever.
If the script dumbs itself down to allow for these broad Komedy interludes, resulting in corny groaners like the agent seeing Mirren and declaring, "I've got a bird of me own," immediately leading to a cut where the chicken-farming neighbor is carving up a roasted bird, it ultimately self-destructs by trying to reconcile the incompatible relationship between the two. Here, then, is where its capitulation to a certain form of crowd-pleasing formula goes past tiresome into fatal - the more I think about the end, the more sour it seems. As Consent digs into the relationship between Mirren and Mason, it comes to an impasse - Mirren clearly has feelings for Mason, feelings which are not being reciprocated. He sees her as an adult, which is gratifying and fulfilling for her, but she comes to realize he only sees her this way because he sees her as a subject - just because he recognizes her womanhood doesn't mean he recognizes her autonomy, and in a scene like the one where Mason is struggling to paint a posing Mirren only to shake his head and mutter, "It's the dress. Take it off." without so much as looking at her... well, that evocative downcast glance by the newly-nude Mirren speaks volumes. She's merely traded one jailer for another and she knows it. So why then, given that this is about her struggle towards autonomy, does it end the way it does? I have to assume this is a function of needing to adhere to the source material - a novel by an artist renowned for his work with the nude female form - but there's still something desperate in the way it manufactures a facsimile of a happy ending, with Mason at the last minute understanding the emotional attachment Mirren has developed for him and deciding - whether out of emotional epiphany or panic at losing his muse, the film isn't clear - sure, fuck it, I do love you too. I try not to be the kind of person who reviews the film they wish they'd seen rather than the one they did, but picking at a perceived flaw necessarily assumes there's a version of this material that would have pleased me; therefore, I submit a stronger film would have Mason left abashed and alone as a chuffed Mirren swims back into the sea that birthed her. But Powell ain't Rohmer, and this ain't La Collectionneuse. So her nascent autonomy gets betrayed in favor of her being revealed as an eleventh-hour Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She was right when she tearfully said, "You only want me for the pictures," and it's to the film's ultimate detriment that it realizes this and frantically tries to wave it away anyway. A pantheon director deserves to go out on better than such a flat note.
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