Age before beauty

>> Reinventing romance in Vénus beauté

by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

Here's the romantic set-up: in the midst of being dumped in a cafe, a woman is watched by a man at another table who finds himself suddenly falling in love with her. The woman, Angele (Nathalie Baye), is 40 years old and beginning to feel the loneliness and indignity of being a single older woman in a world that divides the fairer sex into Madames and Mademoiselles. Angele swings between casual flings and, while no longer excited by the freedom, is still incapable of committing to a long-term relationship. The man who watches her, Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan), is one of those handsome, scruffy French guys, who lives to rock a woman's world. Angele's not interested in love, and Antoine already has a 20-year-old fiancee.

 Angele works in a local beauty clinic, doting on people and trying to make them feel young and beautiful. On some days, the clinic has the atmosphere of a gossipy coffee house full of wacky but endearing clients; on other days it seems like it's Angele's ironic hell sentence straight out of Dante's Inferno.

 What's refreshing about Vénus beauté is that Angele has moments where she's pathetic and other moments where she's tough and cool; sometimes she looks good and sometimes she doesn't. In a film dealing with our obsession with youth and beauty, it's refreshing to see an actress who actually looks her age. Most Hollywood studio films about women over 40 (and they are few and far between) usually star plastic surgery junkies to impress upon us that age can be defied. Every year we watch Goldie Hawn's hair creep closer towards the centre of her face until one day we'll be looking at Cousin It.

 Director Tonie Marshall spins a web of interconnected lives that balances screwball comedy with genuine insight into the nature of aging and beauty. Antoine is engaged to a woman half Angele's age who desperately mourns the end of their relationship, and what the film conveys is that no one, despite their age, has a monopoly on pain. The film's thesis is somewhat Darwinian: love cannot exist without its victims. This said, Venus never turns cynical, but instead delivers a take on love at first sight that doesn't shy away from how suspect our vision can be. :

 

Vénus beauté opens in its original French version Friday, February 4