Age Of Consent Film Review: Cinephilia

From a post-colonial point of view it is unfortunate that a couple of British actors (James Mason, who co-produced, and Helen Mirren) were imported to play the leads as a couple of Australians in this rendition of the Norman Lindsay novel but it is, nevertheless, an enjoyable film. Powell, effectively in self-imposed exile from his beloved mother country after the scathing response to Peeping Tom (1960) and having already made They’re A Weird Mob (1966) Downunder, by all accounts did not think much of his source material or the outcome, reserving most of his praise for it in his memoirs to the dog’s admittedly engaging performance.

A kind of feral comedy of manners set on a tropical island (Dunk Island in actuality) it follows the fortunes of a worn-out painter (Mason) who travels back to his native Australia to re-kindle his artistic fire. The urbane Mason is, as always very watchable, although his attempt to simulate an Australian accent more often than not seems more parodic than anything else. Helen Mirren, in a performance that in Powells hands recalls that of Jennifer Jones in Gone To Earth, at 23 is too old for the part but she enters into the spirit of it with remarkable enthusiasm, spending significant portions of it naked, which one would have thought would have been quite bold for its time. The support cast including Jack MacGowran, Neva Carr-Glyn, Harold Hopkins, Michael Boddy and Frank Thring all help to make this an entreating romp, although Mason and Mirren make it much more than just a comedy, the film also standing quite well as a romantic portrait of bohemian artist life (a subject with which Tony Hancock had had much fun in The Rebel, 1961) . If I am correct the painting done by Mason’s character whilst on the island were actually painted by Arthur Boyd, although oddly when the film open his works appear to be done by John Coburn. There is no mention of the apparent stylistic dissonance, so either no-one cared enough to explain it or the shift from abstraction to figuration was meant to be understood as part of the painter’s re-awakening. The pellucid colour throughout the film was achieved by duplicating the original Technicolour method of a three reel tint (YCMY) on black and white stock then matching all three to create a color negative (the Coburn paintings in the gallery sequence look stunning and in one of them a blue section appears to hover over the canvas). The original score was by Peter Sculthorpe, although for its British and US release Columbia replaced this and cut 10 mins from the film. This was Powell's last film although he lived until 1990. BH

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