Gloriously romantic and bitterly realistic, Innocence is a paean to the durability and longevity of love — not just the spiritual kind of love, but the physical and lustful kind that endures, if one’s lucky, until death do ye part. It’s the sort of optimistic pap that Hollywood turns out on a regular basis, but the made-in-Australia Innocence has an unusual twist: The lovers are both pushing 70 and look nothing like the starry-eyed young lovers we have become accustomed to seeing in the movies. This is love with baggage and wrinkles and risky leaps of faith, since these aged lovers who haven’t seen each other in 40 years have more to lose because of the separate lives they’ve already built for themselves, lives that hold no place for each other within. Andreas (Tingwell) and Claire (Blake) each have families and routines and things that are expected of them. Andreas’ wife died 30 years ago, but Claire is comfortably married to a man who is kind, but takes her for granted. He’s no easy target, though, not a rotten husband who deserves to be abandoned. The movie never stoops to simplifying the predicament (even if it takes some easy ways out toward the conclusion). The faith that Andreas, a religious agnostic and church organist, places in love is contagious. As he explains things, it’s naive not to believe in love. He’s a man near the end of his life who “can’t look at a face without seeing the skull,” yet when he looks at his beloved Claire he sees beauty, joy, and transcendence. Innocence is a movie of little moments: the old lovers undressing for the first time (“Let’s do this like adults,” says Claire. “Close the curtains and shut your eyes.”); grainy memories of the lovers in their youth, the specks of the images converging to form a distant pointillist portrait; the reunion of the lovers at the forced exhumation of Andreas’ dead wife. Innocence offers a moving tribute to love and the courage its risk-taking requires. Innocence may be the perfect (and convenient) antidote to a dose of Shallow Hal, but even without this current Hollywood romantic spoof in mind, the originality of Innocence makes it stand apart from the romantic pack.
This article appears in November 9 • 2001.
