Love amid the wrinkles

>> Paul Cox explores geriatric romance in Innocence

by MATTHEW HAYS

"Shameful!" Paul Cox declares, discussing the dearth of images of older people in movies. The Australian director behind such films as Vincent and Man of Flowers is unleashing his latest, a broadside against youth-obsessed culture.

And the film, as it turns out, is a touching, beautifully told story about two septuagenarians who, 50 years after their adolescent romance, bump into each other once more and fall in love all over again. Innocence is a film that met with very warm audience reception at the World Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival last year. Question is, in the somewhat colder, crueller world of general cinematic release, will the film still win over audiences?

Cox knows what he's up against. People will either find the film endearing and moving or dismiss it as a sappy mess about a couple of old goats getting it on. "I wanted to talk about love and beauty in this film," he says. "But people are very cynical, so it's a difficult thing to do. We live in an age of incredible cynicism." So far, so good for Innocence: box office has proven fairly strong across the continent (the film opened in most North American cities last week), bolstered, no doubt, by allies like powerful critics, including Roger Ebert, who loved the movie.

Parts of Innocence evoke Douglas Sirk melodramas, the two lovers' families' disapproval is felt particularly strongly. But the film's main selling point must be the performances that lie at its centre. Julia Blake and Charles Tingwell deliver finely tuned, rich turns as the couple who rediscover their love for one another five decades after it was first kindled.

The movie does feel like a breakthrough, in a cinematic world where protagonists, particularly those locked in romantic embrace, seem to be getting younger and younger every moment. But Cox says it ties into the rest of his oeuvre perfectly. "It links up with all the other films I've made in that it's a vehicle in which I can say what I believe. Cinema is one of the greatest gifts. There can be such great poetry in film. It can be used in the most extraordinary of all ways. But it can also be used for hatred and cynicism."

Beer in one hand and cigarette in the other, Cox then launches into a rant about all of the negative aspects of the film biz. Though much of what he says is undoubtedly true, at this point he begins to resemble one of those angry uncles you used to avoid at extended-family gatherings when you were eight because his diatribes about life scared you. "Hollywood is full of immature fuckwits! If they were manufacturing shampoo it wouldn't be so bad, we'd just wash our hair in it. But they're making film which affects our children, our art and our culture. Films affect the way people think. Stars also are bullshit. Stars are in the sky, not movies!

"It's bullshit!"

Innocence opens Friday, Oct. 26