When I got back from the last of the eleventy-hundred trips away from home I took this summer, I discovered two DVDs from Blockbuster that Jack had rented while I was out of town (he reverts to this type of behavior when I’m not around to manage our Netflix queue). Venus and Zodiac were both so long overdue that we now owned them. I didn’t want to watch Venus at all, I was sure that it was going to be a last-ditch effort to show the world that Peter O’Toole was still sexy, and pardon my ageism but: not interested.

But I read a couple of online reviews and decided to give it a chance. Sex is very much the point of Venus, and O’Toole is actually very funny as an aging actor looking for work as a corpse or an invalid or whatever he can get, but as I feared it made me cringe to see him as a dirty old man who beguiles a young woman into a perverse emotional relationship built on her willingness to dole out little sexual favors — he lets him smell her neck, and her fingers after she’s put them in her vagina — in exchange for clothes, or a tattoo, or whatever. It’s not that I object to graphic sex but that I have to question the motives of any woman who performs a sexual act for no pleasure of her own but the earning of male favor, approval, or money. It’s prostitution trying to dress up as empowerment, and it depresses me.

It was hard for me to watch this truculent young woman (beautifully played by Jodie Whittaker) get manipulated — by O’Toole, by a thuggish boyfriend that she follows around like a scared child, and by two experienced filmmakers (the director, Roger Mitchell, and the screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi) who are in love with O’Toole’s twinkling eyes and womanizing reputation but indifferent to the concept of pairing his character with a girl with a little backbone. And please, I know, that’s the point of view they wanted to explore, that of an aging man using his charisma on a sweet young thing. So why does Venus repel me when one of my favorite books in the world is Lolita? Maybe because Lolita is matter-of-fact and insolent and more of a manipulator than Humbert, where in Venus the girl is moody and withdrawn and makes me worry that she’d been abused and was headed for more victimhood.

The movie’s worth watching for many things, there’s no denying: O’Toole’s scenes with his buddies in the cafe are delightful; his exchange with Vanessa Redgrave, who plays his crippled ex-wife, made me wish there was a whole movie about their relationship alone.

It kind of baffles me how all the reviews I’ve read of Venus are so okay with such an off-balance story, but what baffles me even more is that no one mentions the gorgeous music in the film by R & B singer Corinne Bailey Rae. Here’s a link to one of her videos on YouTube — it’s all very Nora Jonesey, if you’re into that sort of thing, and I’m usually not but I think she has real presence and sings with tons of heart.

So, Venus the Movie, I have to say, you really bummed me out but I liked your background music a lot.

In the end, I actually put Venus back in the Blockbuster return slot, I didn’t care that they’d already charged us full price for it. I guess now I’d better watch Zodiac.