Growing old gracefully

By a curious coincidence I happened to see three great "last chance" films back to back. That is, movies in which ageing male stars play has-beens trying to recover some shred of their former lustre and self-respect. In a medium relentless in its demand for ever newer and fresher talent, the spectre of human obsolescence hovers in the wings. So there's something moving and exhilarating - not to mention risky - when familiar actors are willing to put their weary features on display and face the music of time in a medium that counts 50 not as a midlife opportunity but as career-ending antiquity.

The films - two revivals and a new release - were Jacques Becker's classic Touchez Pas au Grisbi, with Jean Gabin as an ageing gangster; The Band Wagon, Vincente Minnelli's gloriously moody 1953 musical, with Fred Astaire as a song-and-dance man no longer swift of foot; and Sophia Coppola's haunting Lost in Translation, in which Bill Murray, as an erstwhile star making whiskey commercials in Japan, hooks up with a similarly disoriented married woman.

Truffaut said Touchez Pas au Grisbi, whose star was 49 and director 48, was "a movie about turning 50". But the same could be said of the other films: Astaire (born in 1899) was 54, Bill Murray (b 1950) is 53.

Because his image depends on sexual desirability, Gabin, "l'homme dur" of French cinema and magnet for women, feels the pinch of age most acutely. Astaire, the ethereal dandy of musical comedy, was always more romantic than sensual; and Bill Murray, being a comic actor rather than a traditional leading man, is the least affected by the passage of time. Indeed, his wry, mournful, pockmarked face and quizzical voice have always seemed to gently mock the vainglorious posturings and blithe, fresh-faced optimism of the stars.

With unusual frankness, these three offer the spectacle of their own anxieties about ageing in one of those unnerving instances, called "doubling" by André Bazin, when real and fictional life coincide. Their gallantry is also a gamble. Will we be charmed or repelled by their untouched-up older personae; by their pairing with much younger women? Were the sexes reversed - a 50-year-old woman with a 25-year-old man - the recoil would be automatic, the women seen as grotesque. But even with men whose attraction credentials supposedly improve with age, the viability of the ageing star is no sure thing. "Yum" can turn into "yuk" at the whim of an ever-fickle audience.

The Band Wagon, with its wise and urbane script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, begins with a prolonged humiliation: Astaire is so passé that, in an auction of his personal effects, his signature cane only fetches a few dollars. On the train to New York, where he hopes to revive his career, two portly gents in the bar chortle over his fallen status. One of them betrays the murderous envy of the lay person towards the star when he complains of the way his wife used to see Tony Hunter's films over and over again - her infatuation a revealing comment on the vacuity of her marriage and husband. A gathering of reporters turns out to be clamoring not for him but for Ava Gardner. And then, defying age and space, he embarks on one of his most magical numbers, Shine on Your Shoes, in a Times Square arcade.

Touchez Pas au Grisbi is less introspective, but, with its wry domestic touches, is unusually realistic for an action "policier". Gabin's Max is ready to retire with the bourgeois perks he's accumulated when he and his gang are obliged to stage a bloody showdown to retain the loot ("grisbi") they've stolen. The burned-out kingpin no longer has the energy for the nightclub scene. He prefers a gourmet snack at home with his buddy, and, at the end of the film, he actually dons glasses to make a phone call. The glamorous woman at his side is more an accessory than a love or sex object. Gabin's career, then in a slump, was given a major boost by the movie, which also featured Lino Ventura (Gabin's discovery) as a rival gangster and Jeanne Moreau - who hadn't yet come into her distinctive brand of intelligent beauty - as a treacherous tart.

Lost in Translation is all about spiritual yearning and the ability of two people at opposite ends of the age spectrum - Scarlett Johansson as a lovely, youthful Yale graduate, who is counterpoint to Murray's melancholy has-been - to live with ungratified desire. Staying in the same Tokyo hotel, sleepless and at loose ends, they come together, becoming for each other an opportunity for reflection as much as attraction. Where is my life going? What should I do? asks this smart yet self-deprecating young woman. What has my life been, he questions back. His great days are behind him, and how great were they anyway? His wife calls with redecorating questions, he's in another mood entirely, they don't connect, yet he accepts such disjunctions as part of marriage.

It's the repression of sex and the acceptance of a carnal boundary that can't be crossed that becomes, in their eloquent silence-filled rapport, a form of love more life-altering than the sexual contortions now monotonously de rigueur. Nothing happens, yet everything happens. Johannson is as delectable as spring, but not conventionally beautiful and a bit mulish. Murray is sublime, funny, baffled and wise, agitated as a young lover, calm as a Buddhist. May and December are equally adrift. Age is what you make of it, and a retreat from the pleasures of the flesh is, in this remarkable instance, anything but a defeat.