Running time: 94 mins Barriers break down in the movie that almost earned Peter O'Toole his Oscar, writes Paul Lynch

THE movies have always cared little for elderly people. That's why Greta Garbo locked herself away, never again to be seen by eyes that would damn her for the indignity of growing old. Ageing actors are patronised by lifeachievement awards, or written off to the sidelines. But sometimes you can't keep an old man down.

Venus stars Peter O'Toole as Maurice, a septuagenarian actor whose great days on the stage are long gone but who still pines for romance. Now he plays corpses on TV; he has prostate cancer, becomes incontinent and worse still, impotent. But Maurice hangs on to his libido like it is the last thing worth fighting for; a silky senior citizen who in better days was a ladykiller. When Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the young grandniece of his grumpy pal Ian (Leslie Phillips), arrives to live in London, Maurice's creaky ticker skips a beat.

It's a premise that screams dirty old man, the kind of taboo Hollywood would not touch with a walking stick. But it's daring, charming and not at all controversial - a trans-generational romance of sorts. It is a story resolutely about attitudes to old age and sex, but it beats with warmth and pity. Even the most hidebound ageist will be found sympathising with this lascivious codger.

Maurice spends his mornings in the local caf� with Ian, played with great melodrama by Phillips - "I could die at any moment. I've got high blood pressure!" he laments.

They curse each other like young men as they shuffle through the daily routine: counting out medication, reading the death notices, but they are full of fire. Then Jesse arrives. She is surly and dull, a working class girl with little interest in their high-falutin' theatre backgrounds. She casually exclaims she wants to be a model. So Maurice, naturally, arranges for her to pose naked at his life drawing classes. When she says she can't do it with him there, he leaves. He then gets up on a bucket to peer in through the window.

The film surges between comedy and pathos as Maurice strikes up an unlikely friendship with Jesse, and his attempts to become amorous are rebuffed. He scavenges for affection - a stolen brush of a cheek while she's asleep, a touch of a foot. "For most men, a woman's body is the most beautiful thing they ever see, " he tells her. But she turns his lust to her advantage.

Venus sticks it to the viewer and society's assumptions about old age:

why shouldn't elderly people want to have sex with younger people? It suggests that lusting after young flesh is not disgusting but a natural by-product of age - a vicarious need to rekindle long-lost youth. Director Roger Mitchell and writer Hanif Kureshi have been here before with The Mother, a film that charted the affair of a woman in her 60s with a man half her age, but Venus has a power and poignancy The Mother did not, and it has a lot to do with Peter O'Toole. He has hurled every bit of himself into the role, laying bare the humiliation and forlornness that comes from decrepitude. It is O'Toole, the former playboy and hellraising actor who is now wheezing and gaunt; whose skull pushes through that leathery skin;

those famous, piercing eyes fixed now in deep hollows. When Maurice sits on the side of the bed, with the intense stare of a man looking death in the eye, it is a powerful performance that rings sadly true of life.

When O'Toole's time comes to go gently into that good night, it will be all the sadder that he will do so without his long-sought Best Actor Oscar.

He may not get another chance as great as this.