ROGER MICHELL’S latest film is, first of all, a love letter to youth. But if there’s a covert affair happening on the side, it’s with London, a city that many film-makers inhabit but which the director clearly cherishes.

Venus is Michell’s second collaboration with the writer Hanif Kureishi, after The Mother, and the two films bear superficial similarities. Both deal with that bothersome issue of sexuality — where society would prefer to pretend that it didn’t exist — in those whom old age has stripped of their visibility and, in the case of Venus’s raffish protagonist Maurice, even the ability to perform. But while The Mother was a colder, more clinical film, Venus is steeped in bittersweet romantic yearning.

Peter O’Toole is clearly having a whale of a time as the veteran actor Maurice, an incorrigible rogue who has trouble accepting that he is several decades past his sell-by date. His daily highlight is a breakfast of fading champions in a Kentish Town café. He barters a smorgasbord of prescription pills over tea and toast with Ian (Leslie Phillips), a finicky old luvvie clinging to the dusty laurels of “his Caesar” from half a lifetime ago. Their exchanges are delicious: bitchy backstage banter that is as effortless to these half-forgotten stage legends as hitting their marks.

When Ian’s grand-niece comes to visit, he entertains hopes that she might be able to rustle up a nice bit of fish for him every evening. He is to be deeply disappointed. Maurice, however, is thrilled with the new addition to his circle. Jessie (the newcomer Jodie Whittaker) is sullen, inarticulate, aggressive and, despite herself, slightly intrigued by this raddled old roué. She makes him feel alive again. He rediscovers his city — the galleries, the Thames, the bars sticky with spilt Bacardi Breezers — through her eyes. He allows himself to fall in love a little, not so much with her, perhaps, as with what she helps him to remember about himself.

Maurice is a gift of a role for O’Toole. He is both irreverently playful and profoundly affecting. Whittaker has a tougher job. Not only is she pitched in at the deep end opposite a cast of national treasures, but she also has to work with a character that seems rather underwritten. Jessie is the one character that you feel that Michell and Kureishi had trouble getting to know. Initially, she’s a bundle of antisocial teenager tropes — pot noodles and alcopops; tattoos and tarty gear — a one-woman demonstration of an old man’s grumble about what’s wrong with youth today. If we warm to her by the end of the film, that’s largely due to Whittaker’s sterling work in bringing Jessie in a convincing arc without losing her bolshie, abrasive essence along the way.

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