Hollywood's 'Older Woman' Is Kind Of Young
How swiftly our Princess of Genovia has become Her Majesty The Old.
I’m dog-sitting at a place with an Amazon-equipped TV, so I would be remiss not to weigh in on The Idea Of You: the new film where Anne Hathaway makes her older debut as Solène to some guy called Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine). To be clear, I mostly did enjoy this movie, putting aside the names “Hayes”, “Solène”, and “August Moon”, which are all stupid and bad.
But can we talk for a minute about how swiftly our Princess of Genovia has become Her Majesty The Old? When the trailer dropped last month, shock waves were felt throughout the millennial community, probably, as Anne Hathaway had officially been anointed the “older woman” in a new movie, thanks to her love interest being a 24-year-old called Hayes.
My first thought was that a rom-com that featured a woman older than her male love interest sounded like a welcome break from Hollywood’s old-ass men problem, a problem captured by the 2015 Slate headline, “Leading Men Age, But Their Love Interests Don’t”. Do we remember the graphs? The old men, decades on decades older than their 20-something love interests, their kisses burnt into celluloid for eternity?
There’s nothing new about age gaps in Hollywood, clearly — it’s just that men are usually the (much) older ones. But when men are the older ones, these age gaps are incidental at most. They’re not providing any narrative thrust, nor are they a source of sexual intrigue. Most of the time, they are completely unacknowledged. These are simply men and women being in love, OK? (They’re just innocent men.)
“What will people say?,” a breathless Hathaway memorably utters, as though two white adults having heterosexual sex is somehow pushing the bounds of cultural taboo.
Meanwhile, we have the The Idea Of You, where we see a gender reversal in an attempt to even the keel. But it’s hard not to laugh at how basic this relationship actually is. “What will people say?,” a breathless Hathaway memorably utters in the film when Galitzine asks her to join him on tour, as though two single white people doing heterosexual sex is somehow pushing the bounds of cultural taboo.
That is, the entire movie is about this couple’s age gap: about Solène (French heritage, how chic!) balancing the competing desires of wanting to date someone called Hayes (??) with her responsibilities to her teenage daughter and general cultural norms. That is, The Idea Of You, in playing up an “older woman” story as inherently salacious, is arguably not really helping the idea that women in straight relationships are meant to be younger than the men.
Interestingly, in the few “older woman” movies out there, age differences are not that pronounced, especially between the actors themselves. Who can forget Unfaithful, in which the 36-year-old Diane Lane played the “older woman” to Oliver Martinez, who was in real life… 35?
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Notably, the actors who play Hollywood’s “older women” tend to either play the age they are, or are aged up. In Unfaithful, Lane’s character Connie was a year older than her at 37, and Martinez was aged down to 28. Similarly, Hathaway would’ve made The Idea Of You when she was 39, while Galitzine, who turns 30 this year, was aged down.
Queer Theorist Eric Stanley argues that one way of monitoring normative culture is paying attention to the concessions it is most willing to make. In The Idea Of You, we see that Hollywood will allow an “older woman”, but only in the case that she’s as young, white, and thin as possible.
I mean, casting Anne Hathaway was a choice. In the last few years, we’ve seen a surge of positive sentiment towards the actor, partly as an attempt to correct a supposed backlash against the actress in the 2010s, and for achieving the greatest thing that women in Hollywood can – not looking much older than she did in 2001.
Hathaway is notably statuesque enough to be a model (the scene where she feels too embarrassed to wear a swimsuit is really, truly, an insult) and of course, white. The author behind the book herself, Robinne Lee, has even commented that she made her leads white with the intention of getting it bought. Talking To Refinery29, Lee says: “If Solène was a Black woman showing up with this guy who's half her age and white, it would have been a whole thing.”
We can see then, why The Idea Of You feels so limited in its attempts at flipping the script. (And we don’t even have time to talk about what Lee’s decision says about our discomfort with non-white people in love). This is a book that was written to go down easily with audiences, one that won’t ruffle too many feathers and all in all, seems vaguely “empowering”, even if what it’s ultimately doing for women is telling them they’re old when they were born in 1983.
Lee talks of being a Francophile, of living in Paris where older women in relationships with younger men are normalised to the extent that Emmanuel Macron, the country’s former Prime Minister, got elected while being married to a woman 25 years his senior. She speaks of how American conservatism, on the other hand, tends to disregard a woman’s sexuality at around the age of 40.
It was at that age that Lee wrote her book, in which the age gap between her two leads was a bit wider, with Hayes written as a 20-year-old. But while there was a clear attempt to inject French sensibility into her novel, its movie adaptation took some of it back out — aging Hayes up to 24 to give him some more distance from adolescence and making the whole thing feel more OK.
But if we’re going to have a film about an age gap relationship, can we actually like… have one? Why did the book’s two-decade difference in the leads’ ages get knocked down? Why was Anne Hathaway still in her 30s when this movie was made? And what will it take for the Anglosphere to know that women also exist and have sex at the ages of 50, 60, and 70?
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Lee is right that the French are more evolved when it comes to telling stories about older women: actual older women, played by luminaries like Isabelle Huppert (71), Fanny Ardant (75), and Catherine Deneuve (79). But The Idea Of You is so sanitised, so moderate in its attempts at transgression that it’s not really doing anything. Dare I say, this movie is the Harry Styles of cinema: only as subversive as American culture will allow, which isn’t very much at all.
Reena Gupta is a writer and editor. She was previously Junkee’s Deputy Editor and before that a staff writer at MTV Australia, with bylines in Kill Your Darlings, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Latch, and more. She tweets at @purpletank.