While their relationship is awkward at first, there is something gradually growing despite the huge gap between them. O'Toole and Whittaker have a touching scene when Jessie takes a bath at Maurice's home while he is waiting for her outside the bathroom as she demands. She confides a hurtful incident in her past to him, and he responds to her confession with a heartfelt recitation of one of Shakespeare's sonnets, and that considerably affects her feelings toward him. Although she lets him down a lot later through her wrong choices, Jessie comes to care about Maurice more than before, and she eventually follows the better side brought out by their relationship when he really needs her.

While it is warmed up a bit by their story, the movie seldom overlooks the fact that their winter romance is merely a small kindling about to be extinguished in front of the approaching night in Maurice's life. He and his friends jokingly talk about how many columns they will get in the obituary section when they are dead, but they are all aware of the grim fact of their lives; it won't be long before they will be mentioned in the section.

There is also the melancholic sense of loss hovering over them. The blank left by the people they knew in their life is getting bigger along the passage of time, and all they can do is wistfully reminiscing about the past which will never come back. Leslie Phillips, Richard Griffiths (he plays Maurice's other close friend), and Vanessa Redgrave (as Maurice's ex-wife) nicely support O'Toole as the people who have known Maurice for a long time while getting old along with him, and Phillips has a poignant moment with O'Toole when they look around the plaques of famous British actors at the Covent Garden's Actors' Church. They knew all these people including Boris Karloff, Robert Shaw, Richard Beckinsale (yes, he is Kate Beckinsale's father), and Laurence Harvey, but they are all gone now, and that makes Maurice and Ian more painfully aware of their fading life. With Dvorák's Slavonic Dance No. 2 played nearby by a practicing quartet, they promptly begin to dance, though they look like a dancing couple left alone in the ballroom while everyone else has already left.

Although its third act feels strained due to the choppy progress of the plot, "Venus" remains effective as a mournful human drama which handles its tricky subject well with care, respect, and a little humor. Through its sensitive depiction of the unlikely relationship between its two main characters, it tells us that some romantic relationship can be formed by something other than physical love, and we come to see that both of them get a lot from each other in the end. Jesse gets a better view of herself while moving forward in her life, and Maurice is satisfied with where he arrives at with her, though that matters to him little after that point.

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