The Age of Consent

Mores change.  It may be that they evolve.  Michael Powell's last film The Age of Consent (1969), the story of a middle-aged painter and his teenage model, is questionable by present standards.  The girl is young and innocent; a man in his fifties paints her nude and the narrative implies a love affair.  The man is a world-famous painter; the girl is an impoverished orphan with no experience of any world outside the near-desert island where she lives.  The movie plays like the sexual fantasy of its creators -- the movie is produced by Powell and James Mason, who plays the painter.  There is a sense in which the "consent" to the sexual relationship is problematic -- the girl is infatuated by an older, much more powerful, man who presents himself as her benefactor and, then, exploits her.  Questions as to the ethics of the relationship are intrinsic to the film and there is some considerable anxiety about these issues, masked by various narrative stratagems.  When Martin Scorsese spearheaded the restoration and DVD re-issue of this film about ten years ago, problematic aspects of the picture were not an issue; neither Scorsese nor Helen Mirren, who played the girl in 1969, seem to have any doubts about the film's dubious premise.  To them, the  picture  is an exercise in technical artistry, remarkable for its beauty, and the problems that the film may present to a viewer in 2020 are not raised -- this is despite the movie's title and casting (James Mason played Humbert Humbert in Kubrick's Lolita made seven or eight years earlier).  The ground has shifted, as it were, under our feet and the meaning of this minor work by the great Michael Powell has changed.

The Age of Consent is a desert island idyll.  A world-famous painter travels to the Great Barrier Reef  to re-charge his creative batteries on a remote island.  His plan is to live alone, observe nature, and seek inspiration in the natural beauty around him.  In fact, the island isn't deserted at all -- an elderly alcoholic woman lives there with her granddaughter, Cora (Helen Mirren).  There's also a lonely spinster who has a nice bungalow and supports herself by raising chickens (called "chooks" in the movie).  The island has an odd economy -- it's inhabitants gather shellfish and lobsters, transport them to the mainland, across a bay about two miles wide, where a rapacious merchant sells them in a general store.  Cora is abused by her drunk grandma.  Her dead mother was said to be "the town bike" -- that is, she would "give a ride" to anyone who asked.  Cora longs to escape the island, which is a sort of paradise, and travel to Brisbane where she plans to work as a "hair stylist."  We first see Cora emerging from the sea in a purplish dress that is plastered to her body and completely transparent -- she steals some the artist's provisions.  Brady Morahan, the painter, decorates his shack with drawings and murals.  He buys some of the girl's shell-fish and lobsters, a bargain since they have eliminated the middle-man on the mainland.  Intrigued by the girl, Morahan  asks her to model -- she's happy to strip naked for him since he pays her a dollar and half per hour.  (She has told him that when her nest-egg reaches 100 dollars, she is going to move to Brisbane.)  Morahan's boorish friend from his youth in Queensland, Nate Kelly shows up -- he's on the run because he owes alimony and, apparently, under Australian law a default in alimony payments can land you in jail.  Kelly fancies himself a great lady's man and he decides to seduce Morahan's neighbor, the middle-aged woman with the chickens. The woman is big, strong and lonely and she rapes Kelly -- at least, this is what he claims.  (You will note the queasy issues circulating through this plot involving consent).  Kelly tries to steal 300 dollars from the artist and attempts to escape from the island.  Aspects of the plot resemble My Fair Lady without the pedagogy -- Cora's nasty grandmother assumes that the girl is prostituting herself to the artist, something that doesn't bother her as long as she gets her share of the money.  The old woman finds Cora's cache and steals her money -- this is intercut with Nat Kelly stealing Morahan's money.  There's a confrontation with the vicious old lady, drunk as usual, and Cora pushes her -- the old woman falls off a cliff and breaks her neck.  At this point, the local constable appears and, after some anxious moments, gives Morahan back his 300 dollars -- Kelly has been apprehended on the mainland.  Cora, not knowing that Morahan has received his money, comes to the artist and offers him her entire savings.  When he rejects its, the girl is angry because the artists has failed to grasp the meaning of her gesture -- she is, in fact, offering herself entirely to the older man.  The artist remains gentlemanly and turns down the girl's sexual overture.  But, not for long:  Cora plunges into the sea and when Morahan pursues her, she embraces him, and, like s sea nymph, drags him under the surf -- the last shot is a freeze-frame of her naked leg kicking up out of the water. (Throughout the movie, Cora is referred to as "under-age" by her nasty grandmother; the idea of statutory rape is finessed by having Cora acts as the sexual aggressor -- the artist has very touched her; but, of course, the girl is unable to grant consent, if she is really under-age, and, therefore, this narrative ruse doesn't work -- at least, with modern audiences.  The scene in which the lonely spinster violently attacks Nat Kelly is grotesque but, again, seems devised to show that it's not any kind of rape when the woman makes the first move, also a dubious proposition.  Powell is fair to his characters and, after showing the spinster as a voracious sexual predator, he adds a sad scene in which the middle-aged woman, neatly dressed and made-up, comes to Morahan's bungalow to inquire about the man that she desires -- he has now fled the island but she's too dignified to show any emotion other than a repressed sense of sadness.) 

The picture is notable in the history of cinema for being the first non-pornographic movie made in the English-speaking film industry to feature full-frontal female nudity.  (In the interview, Mirren seems proud of this distinction.)  In fact, Cora is fantastically beautiful, although she's not proportioned like a conventional sex goddess -- she has a plump very muscular posterior, short legs, and surprisingly large breasts:  of course, she looks fabulous and the fact that she doesn't have the stylized Barbie doll figure of a typical beauty queen makes her all the more appealing:  in short, she looks plausibly real.  Defects in the film turn out to be intentional -- for instance, the girl seems to wear water-resistant lipstick.  (But since she wants to work as a beautician it is reasonable to think that she would use some make-up.)  Mirren is naked for half the film and, of course, its worth watching the movie just to see her although, I suppose, the ethics of the production ought to be taken into account.  Apparently, it's very hot at the Great Barrier Reef locations where the film was shot and Mirren recalls that there was "no problem" with the nudity because everyone was dressed for the weather -- that is, wearing bathing suits all day long.  Production stills show Powell, for instance, naked except for tight bikini-style bathing trunks.  A handsome young kid who ferries the characters back and forth from the island (he unsuccessfully tries to rape Cora, a scene played for laughs) wears a very brief bathing suit and nothing else throughout the movie.  Cora swims naked and the artist watches her through a box with a glass bottom on his boat -- these sequences have an ecstatic dreamy atmosphere.  The theme is that the young girl's beauty restores the artist's inspiration and the film belongs among a number of pictures made by Powell (and his partner Emeric Pressburger) about artists -- particularly The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann.  After making this picture, Powell worked until his death to raise money to mount a production of The Tempest and, as Scorsese points out, this minor picture (it's casually made and seems to have been a sort of lark for its participants) is like a sketch for that more ambitious film that was never made:  Cora is like Miranda and there's a Prospero figure, the fatherly James Mason as the artist, as well as a monstrous character, a bit like Caliban in Cora's granny.  The old woman, an "old bat", is pictorially equated with the raucous colony of Flying Foxes on the island, often shown in extreme close-up.  The film is an idyll -- there's no suspense to speak of -- and the imagery is a combination of unearthly beauty and very low, even vulgar comedy.  There are some symbolic sequences -- the film begins with a surreal image of a watch suspended in a aquarium full of Barrier Reef tropical fish.  (I suppose this represents the collision between our modern sense of time and the timelessness of the Barrier Reef -- something particularly poignant since the Reef has now been largely destroyed by global warming and run-off from agricultural fields resulting in the clear waters now mostly obscured by algae.)   Early in the film, the artist makes a nude sand sculpture of Cora, complete with pubic hair of seaweed and and coral nipples -- the movie compares the two women (Cora and the sand Cora sleeping side by side).  This sequence is creepy and dreamlike -- it has a somber "full fathom five" resonance.  Powell shows the island in all moods -- there are sometimes big waves and dark clouds and torrential rains.  Much of the comedy is very low.  The opening scenes in New York City and, then, Brisbane (where the artist is in bed having sex with a woman approximately his own age) are vulgar and aggressively satirical. (An American couple discuss Morahan's art -- if you want to hear how the English perceive American accents -- and its not pretty -- listen carefully to the honked voices in this sequence.)  The scenes with the would-be Romeo and thief Nat Kelly are also broad, an attempt it seems at Shakespearian low humor.  Mirren was 23 when the picture was made; James Mason was 59.  A shot in which we see Cora spearfishing with a torch at sunset, flanked by two other torches set in the water, is one of the most beautiful images ever committed to film.