Fade to grey?

When it comes to portraying the over-forties, Hollywood tends to deal in stereotypes. Calendar Girls is one of three new films that promise to break new ground. But should we believe the hype? Ryan Gilbey takes a closer look at the rise of grey power

Technological advances have taken cinema into unexplored territories, but one region that film has not yet traversed without coyness or cosmetic interference is the human body. Flesh is routinely bared for the camera only when it has been aerobicised beyond all resemblance to the human form - only when it is as blemishless as Keanu Reeves' complexion in The Matrix Reloaded. It is no secret that real body shapes can't be shown in mainstream cinema for fear of undermining a good hundred years of Hollywood-based body fascism. What other reason could there be to depict obesity only through the use of trim surrogates such as Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal, or Eddie Murphy in the Nutty Professor films? Why else would Fight Club, for all its supposed daring, have drawn the line at placing Meat Loaf in an equivalent state of undress as his fellow bareknuckle enthusiasts? (The first rule of Fight Club may be that no one talks about Fight Club. But the second rule of Fight Club is that no one with man-breasts gets to remove their shirt.)

More taboo even than the overweight body is the middle-aged or elderly body. It is unusual enough to come upon a picture that addresses emotional relationships in the over-50s without sentimentality, let alone one that acknowledges that when you hit that half-century you don't necessarily button up your cardigan forever and foreswear nudity until the mortuary slab. But three new films promise to celebrate the sexual identity of the age group that cinema forgot, even if that promise is not in all cases honoured.

The most uncomplicated attitude toward the post-menopausal body can be found in Swimming Pool, though it should be noted that this is Charlotte Rampling we're talking about, so it's not just any old post-menopausal body. This once frosty and forbidding ice maiden has matured into a sprightly nymph for whom the gain in years has brought a commensurate increase in playfulness. In Swimming Pool, her nude scene ambushes the audience after a preceding 90 minutes in which the camera has been primarily interested in the breasts of Rampling's young co-star Ludivine Sagnier.

When Rampling is presented naked for the camera, and her body flexes to meet the inquisitive fingertips of an elderly gardener, you may experience a jolt of pleasure that has nothing to do with titillation and everything to do with the breaching of a stubborn taboo: the same sensation that you get from seeing Pam Grier and Robert Forster throwing middle-aged caution to the wind with their discreetly passionate kiss at the end of Jackie Brown, or Burt Lancaster baring his ravaged, paunchy torso as he bathes in Cattle Annie and Little Britches. In these moments, one of cinema's enduring commandments - "Thou shalt not show the over-40s in states of arousal or undress" - is spectacularly broken.

The new British comedy Calendar Girls would seem well placed to challenge the prejudices against middle age, though such hopes fizzle out as the movie introduces a roster of measures to thwart the relationship between nudity and sexuality. The film is based on the exploits of a Yorkshire branch of the Women's Institute, which compiled a calendar of its members engaging in activities such as baking and flower arranging; what made this a bigger hit than the traditional calendars was the fact that the models were nude, their modesty preserved by a strategically positioned rhododendron or two.

Calendar Girls retains the basic premise while embellishing it with invented characters and fabricated conflicts. The picture is undermined not by the elements that are added so much as those that have been subtracted. The film-makers are so concerned that someone in the audience might regard these lovable housewives as sexual beings that they have created the most airless and austere study of self-expression imaginable. The nude scenes themselves were always going to have a picture-postcard ring to them, and no viewer could deny the simple joy of watching Celia Imrie conceal her breasts with a pair of moist Belgian buns. Elsewhere, the constant reminders that the calendar was conceived to raise money for the hospital in which one woman's husband had recently died of leukaemia act like sporadic cold showers poured on both the characters and the audience.

When it isn't warning us not to become too excited by a flash of Helen Mirren's breasts (presuming we haven't seen Hussy or Excalibur), the movie infantilises its heroines. These are women who insist on a "no front bottom" clause, and who line up on the sofa like naughty schoolgirls to apologise to the photographer whom they have intimidated. Once they leave Yorkshire for Los Angeles, they become little girls lost - playing with the reclining seats in business class, gawping at the opulence of their hotel, even being tricked into appearing naked for a television commercial. What had started out as a scenario rich with empowerment and celebration - instigated by the dying husband's claim that "the last stage of womanhood is the most glorious" - has mutated into one in which the women have not only less to wear but less dignity than when they began. It is typical of the film that its only instance of outright sexuality is to be found in a character who bares her long-hidden tattoo for the calendar, and once had an interracial relationship. That's as much sexual liberation as the picture can take.

Calendar Girls has a fundamental fear of the bodies that it professes to celebrate, which seems particularly stark in the light of The Mother, a new film about an intergenerational relationship between a 30-year-old man and the 65-year-old mother of his girlfriend. The frankness of Hanif Kureishi's screenplay, which draws on the similar relationship at the heart of Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul, would be nothing without Roger Michell's unblinking direction, not to mention the fearlessness of the actress Anne Reid. The images may at times lose focus or definition during the sex scenes between Reid and Daniel Craig, but there is no confusion about what we are seeing. It is crucial to the film's power that the nude shots of Anne Reid, like those of Charlotte Rampling, are patently authentic; the cutaway or the long shot don't fool anyone any more. It could be argued that by using a younger body double for Angie Dickinson at the start of Dressed to Kill, Brian De Palma was honouring the character's fantasy of herself, though it still rankled that Dickinson could be presented as a plausible sex siren with her clothes on, but not with her clothes off. There seems little disparity between that breed of editorial trickery and the joke shot of Ruth Gordon's head tweezered on to Bo Derek's body in Every Which Way but Loose.

If The Mother feels revolutionary, it is because sexuality in older people is rarely treated as anything other than a freak show. The procession of white-haired grandmothers who play sex games in The Producers embodies the male nightmare of a female libido that refuses to give up even after the body has appeared to; it's an image that recurs in the Farrelly Brothers' films Kingpin and There's Something About Mary, where the spectacle of middle-aged women with sexual desires is as gruesome as any of the ostentatiously disgusting spectacles that those movies can contrive.

The Mother may be a small corrective to our preconceptions, but it's an important one. When Anne Reid disrobes, you want to look, just as you do when Clint Eastwood reveals his imperfect trunk in Blood Work, or the late Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story bares a body as coarse-grained as the landscape he will travel by lawnmower, or Kathy Bates reduces Jack Nicholson to silence by virtue of her magnificent nudity in About Schmidt. It makes a pleasant change from seeing Brad Pitt take off his shirt again; his torso always makes me want to ask - is that real or computer generated?

'Swimming Pool' opens 22 August; 'Calendar Girls' opens 5 September; 'The Mother' is released later this year