Hanif Kureishi first made his name as an enfant terrible writing about the bright young stoned things of multicultural Britain in the 1980s. Multi- culturalism is dead now, and youth has lost its allure, but Kureishi still likes to make trouble. As young people doing sex and drugs won’t upset middle England any more, he has wisely moved on to a topic with a few taboos left — the sex lives and erotic longings of the old. He did it in 2003, with the director Roger Michell, in The Mother, the story of a mature woman’s affair with a younger man. Now Kureishi and Michell have teamed up again for a tale about an old man’s love for a young woman.

It’s a romantic comedy with a difference: instead of meeting cute, we get prostate cancer, impotence, incontinence and death.

Maurice (Peter O’Toole) and Ian (Leslie Phillips) are old actorrrrrs and the best of friends. They meet daily for drinks and dine on old memories. Mornings are spent scanning the obituary columns to see which of their friends have died. Ian is the sensible one, with high blood pressure and a high tolerance of his friend Maurice, an incorrigible roué with prostate cancer who wears a cravat and a bemused smile. When he’s not doing the odd bit of acting, he pops round to check on Ian. Their routine — and, eventually, their friendship — is disrupted when Ian’s 19-year-old great-niece, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), comes to stay with him. Ian imagines she will be a cross between Fanny Cradock and Florence Nightingale. What he gets is a Jade Goody without the mouth.

Maurice first sees Jessie, who is 50 years younger than he is, at Ian’s home, wearing a pink tracksuit, slurping down noodles; she is silent and sullen. That evening, while Ian sleeps, Maurice takes her to the Royal Court theatre. Come the interval, Jessie takes him to a boozer, where they get hammered. And so begins a romance of a kind.

Maurice tries to woo Jessie with art and culture. He quotes Shakespeare and takes her to the National Gallery to see the Rokeby Venus. In one of the best moments, he tells her that a woman’s naked body is the most beautiful thing a man can ever see. “What’s the most beautiful thing a woman can ever see?” she asks. “Her first-born child,” he replies. It’s the most memorable line I’ve heard in a film for years.

But this is no Educating Rita. For Jessie, the only interesting things about Maurice are that he’s “sort of famous” and spends money on her. They are linked by loneliness. Their relationship evolves into one of mutual exploitation. He buys her things, she rewards him with little gifts: “You may smell my neck if you want.” She is his “Venus”; he is her meal ticket.

Maurice tells Jessie that he is impotent, but has sexual longings for her, and I like the way Kureishi never ducks the fact that she finds him and his old-man touch and old-man smell repulsive. (In Hollywood films, old guys can still get the girl.) When Maurice tries to steal a kiss, she retaliates with a punch. The Mother was far more shocking in its depiction of sex across the generations; Maurice’s lechery is mostly of a comic kind (as when he tries to peek at Jessie posing naked for an art class) or remarkably restrained (as when he looks up her skirt). I suspect Kureishi has pulled his punches and made Maurice’s transgressions acceptable because otherwise the audience would lose sympathy with him. He wants us to believe there is some sort of romance going on, but it isn’t convincing and it sugar-coats the reality of the situation: Maurice wants her body, not her heart. This ain’t Romeo and Juliet: it’s the story of a dirty old man and a manipulative minx who find friendship, not love. But that’s what makes it so moving.

Venus is like a variation on Death in Venice, only this could be Death in Kentish Town. The cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, has given the film a grey and grimy sheen that’s perfect for this small world of genteel poverty, where sad and shabby lives are lived in the shadow of death.

With Vanessa Redgrave, Phillips, Richard Griffiths and the newcomer Whittaker, Venus is a display of great British acting. Best of all, we haven’t seen O’Toole in a lead part for many years, and this is a triumphant comeback. He manages to avoid the easy caricature of an ageing luvvie to give us a real old man — full of life, full of lust and longing for one last kiss.

Venus, Four stars
15, 94 mins

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