Surgeons race to save a life as the Stairway to Heaven hovers expectantly in the Archers’ classic, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
isn’t it?”), which seem more in the line of Chuck Jones or Tex Avery. On Disc 2 is AGE OF CON-
SENT. Co-producer James Ma- son plays Bradley Morahan, a successful artist fed up with his own success, with the art world, with the city, with other people. He flees New York for Dunk Isle off the Australian coast, where he finds Cora (Helen Mirren), whose name may be intended to evoke coral (as in “of his bones are coral made”) and the Great Barrier Reef where she swims. The plotline is a series of incidents with minor characters who are mostly motivated by sexual feel- ings, and this is meant to con- trast with the relationship between Bradley and Cora, which is not so motivated though he’s constantly having her take her clothes off.
On the side of the curdled old misanthrope, the motivation is
spiritual and artistic. He has (to his conscious knowledge) no in- terest in Cora sexually but only in what she represents: nature, purity, the light, the elements, and his own creative rebirth as visualized by his new, earthy, rep- resentational style. (His abstract New York paintings are by John Coburn while the Gauguin-ish is- land work is by Paul Delprat.) What Cora finds in all this, besides an opportunity to make money through modeling fees, is a growing awareness of, and con- fidence in, herself as a person with a young strong body of which she needn’t feel ashamed. This contrasts with the poison- ous judgments heaped upon her by grandmother Ma Ryan (Neva Carr-Glyn), who compares her with a shameful, lost mother. What some might call Cora’s self- actualization and empowerment is perhaps best called maturity.
Her final step is to free herself from opression in a scene of lit- eral and figurative knocking off. In his commentary, Kent Jones says this climax reminds him of GONE TO EARTH, though I per- sonally see a strange echo of BLACK NARCISSUS.
It’s an idea typical of its era of sexual liberation that Cora’s freedom should come about through posing naked, albeit without apparently sexual objec- tification, since the artist is inter- ested in that spiritual line between the naked and the nude. The title refers to Ma Ryan’s nasty, black- mailing threats of how the law would perceive the relationship even though it’s sexless—at least it is until the very end, after Bra- dley has come to his own self- awareness. The title also implies that the age is a personal one and that it even applies to Bradley, the age when he consents to renew
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