Love, wrinkles conquer Venice – Mirren hits the road in ‘Leisure Seeker’

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VENICE, Sept 4, (Agencies): Love conquers all, even when wrinkles become part of the equation. That’s the message from Helen Mirren and from Venice, appropriately the world’s oldest film festival. An art form that for decades was constructed around the dynamics of youthful sexuality has belatedly discovered that, when it comes to love and sex, there are other stories to tell, and audiences waiting to hear them.

After Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, 81 and 79 respectively, hooked up for the fourth time in their illustrious careers in Netflix drama “Our Souls at Night”, now it is the turn of Mirren, 72, and Donald Sutherland, 82, to fly the flag for love in later life. In “The Leisure Seeker”, Italian director Paolo Virzi’s first English language film, the duo play a retired couple who decide to flee their stifling existence and its cast of doctors and bossy grown-up children, for a final road trip in their vintage 1970s camper van.

Mirren said she had been drawn to the “funny, natural story” after some initial hesitation. “Of course I love watching movies with young beautiful people in them”, she told AFPTV in an interview in Venice. “But the wonderful thing about film as an art form is that it has this ability to show us culture and life and humanity in all its different ways of being.

“And it had Donald Sutherland in it!” Sutherland, whose career has ranged from 1967 World War II epic “The Dirty Dozen” to the recent Hunger Games franchise, plays a retired teacher who can still recite pages of Hemingway but is losing his short-term memory and is no longer entirely reliable at the wheel of a vehicle. Mirren’s character is battling cancer but remains the couple’s driving force and the actress says the charm of the story lies in its universal quality.

“Every single family on this planet today will go through a version of this”, she said. The couple’s journey takes them from Boston to Key West in Florida, allowing them time to nurture each other, discuss what comes after this life and go over a shared stock of memories, not all of which have been previously shared. “Obviously we are dealing with people — as we are — who are towards the ends of our lives not the beginning of their lives”, Mirren said.

Successes

“And with that comes all of our history of experience and all the film festivals we’ve been to, and all the roles that we’ve had and the successes we’ve had, and the failures we’ve had, the disasters, the families, the relationships. “It’s wonderful to be able to find a role and a film where you simply kind of be who you are”. Sutherland concurred: “It was an opportunity to get to the centre of some kind of truth and use our persons as a vehicle for it”, he said.

“Being old does not in any way diminish love and desire”. It can however lead to confusion: one of the road trip’s most endearing moments features Sutherland jovially participating in a pro-Trump demonstration and his wife reminding him of his lifelong support for the Democrats.

“It’s a film about being free to choose how to live your life right up to the last moment”, said Virzi, whose film was presented here in competition for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion.

Redford and Fonda have received rave reviews for their measured performances in “Our Souls at Night”, which tells the story of widowed neighbours who begin sharing a bed, for company and conversation.

Redford, a major voice in US independent cinema through his Sundance Institute, said he had chosen the project specifically because not enough films were being made for and about his now-retired baby-boomer generation — arguably the last that will be regular cinema goers in the age of streaming and digital home projectors.

The power of the grey dollar, euro and pound has been underlined in recent years by the success of the Marigold Hotel films about British retirees in India.

Love in the twilight years was also addressed in Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed “45 Years”, for which Charlotte Rampling, 71, was nominated for the 2016 Best Actress Oscar for her performance as a long-married woman destabilised by revelations about a passionate relationship her husband had in his youth.

Rampling returns to the screen here this week in the premiere of “Hannah”, 35-year-old Italian director Andrea Pallaoro’s drama about a woman unhinged by her husband being sent to prison.

The Italian nights are getting cooler as fall approaches, and there’s something autumnal about many of the movies at the Venice Film Festival this year.

The 11-day Venice festival, which runs to Saturday, has already included Jane Fonda and Robert Redford trying to avoid a lonely old age in “Our Souls at Night”. Still to come is Michael Caine reflecting on his 1960s heyday in the documentary “My Generation”.

Mirren said she welcomed the chance the movie offered to look at questions of life and death.

The 72-year-old said the film was “a reflection of the way I hope to live my life”.

“I loved the character of Ella because she is facing the end of her life, but she is facing the end of her life full of energy and commitment to life and pleasure in life that I hope that I can maintain to the end of my days”, Mirren told reporters on Sunday.

This is the first US-set film by acclaimed Italian director Virzi (“Like Crazy”, “Human Capital”). Virzi said he was reluctant to make it, wary of what can go wrong when filmmakers venture outside of their cultural comfort zones.

He told himself he’d make the movie only if he could get Sutherland and Mirren — and to his shock, they both agreed.

“An Italian in America looking at the American culture, American way of life, American landscape — they have an eye which is fresh and individual and uninfluenced by politics or culture of history of family or anything”, she said. “And I think that’s a very powerful eye.

Mirren said Virzi’s view of America was “generous. Not critical in a crass way, because Paolo’s eye is ultimately a loving eye”.

Donald Trump has sometimes felt like a presiding spirit at this year’s Venice festival, because so many of the films deal with social divisions that have been heightened during his campaign and presidency. A notable example was George Clooney’s satirical thriller about racial conflict, “Suburbicon”, which premiered Saturday.

“The Leisure Seeker” was shot in the US in 2016 and features a Trump rally that the crew came across while filming.

American writer Stephen Amidon, who worked with Virzi on the script, said he and the film’s American producer initially resisted the director’s desire to include the Trump phenomenon in the movie.

“We thought this Trump thing was a passing phenomenon that was just this blip, this parenthesis in American culture”, he said. “And lo and behold, Paolo was right”.

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