The female gender gap has come to the movies

For too long, cinema and TV have persisted in the belief that their protagonists, always strictly men, needed a love interest at least ten, fifteen, or even twenty years younger than the hero, without the plot requiring it. The characters could be part of any story: dramatic, horror, comic, explicitly romantic. Never once could a handsome fifty-year-old fall in love with a beautiful fifty-year-old. Or at least not often. Even when the protagonist's age is relatively young, the story remains the same. Just consider that in The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio, aka Jordan Belfort, was thirty-eight at the time, while his co-star Margot Robbie stood out for her very young age, twenty-three years - and we all thank Martin Scorsese's work for bringing the Australian actress to prominence, but also consider that in real life the entrepreneur and his wife, renamed Naomi Lapaglia in the film, were only five years apart, not sixteen. Anyway, that Hollywood has never been kind to women over forty is a well-known truth, and breaking away from the custom that the protagonist inevitably falls in love with a younger face and body is a cross we might still bear for a long time. A sort of unwritten and unspoken rule, but one that has hovered over film studios since iconic couples like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (twelve years apart). In 2024, however, there's been a leap forward, and within a couple of months, two films were released, first on Prime Video and then on Netflix, which highlight the "reverse" gender gap.

Mother of a teenage daughter whom she takes to Coachella with her friends, The Idea of You mistakenly brings protagonist Solène, played by Anne Hathaway, into the trailer of pop star Hayes Campbell, the young Nicholas Galitzine, mistaking the mobile home for the bathroom. The two are fifteen years apart - while in real life, twelve. A love story begins between Solène and Hayes, based on the adaptation of Robinne Lee's book of the same name (not inspired, as erroneously claimed, by a Harry Styles fan fiction), and the age difference becomes the central nerve of the story. Despite trying to break free from any prejudice, for the protagonist, it is difficult to bear the weight not only of others' glances but of the media attention that her world-famous boyfriend brings with him. Fame is an amplifier of hypocrisy that we have often seen reported in tabloids and newspapers, where it is inconceivable that a young man could feel genuine emotions and attraction for an older woman. It is what happens in the star system. Over the years, no one seems to have been troubled by couples like Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, or Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas, yet at the time they were (and still are) twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-five years apart, respectively.

When it’s the reverse, it’s a different story. It's true that Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson announced their engagement when the actor was just nineteen and the director he met on the set of Nowhere Boy (2009) was forty-two, but fifteen years later, they are still together, have had two children, and are married. Similarly, in the mid-nineties, it seemed incredible that a twenty-eight-year-old Hugh Jackman wanted to be with his colleague and producer Deborra-Lee Furness, who was forty-one. Twenty-seven years of love before their divorce in 2023. And we challenge anyone to say that the news was not heartbreaking. The fact remains that the age difference between men and women in romantic relationships is seen as purely male territory, as if possessing the Y chromosome automatically legitimizes having a partner from another generation, while if a woman does the same, she must find a way to justify herself. This is the premise of The Idea of You. Although there is a genuine relationship and reciprocal erotic and emotional attraction, the work must continually validate a bond that would be bothersome whether Hayes was famous or just an ordinary guy. It is out of the norm to see a woman pursuing a younger man without him being labeled a "toy boy", as if such a union should only be about the unusual and perverse dimension of fun, play, fetish, and simulation, instead of understanding people's emotions.

An idea, indeed, that is nonetheless the pivot of a film where both Hathaway and Galitzine are as beautiful as the sun and which entertains exactly as a romantic-commercial product should. And it is developed with sharpness while remaining within the realm of mainstream films, the same ones that at some point aim to make you think but also get caught up in the exhilarating and overwhelming whirlwind of a fantasy love affair. A step forward in this sense, although still within a comedy that is interesting because it does not problematize the characters' ages, is A Family Affair: the story of a movie star's assistant, played by Joey King, whose mother, played by Nicole Kidman, starts a relationship with her boss Zac Efron. The two had already met in their careers: it was 2012, the film The Paperboy, and there was a certain chemistry between their characters. This time the atmosphere is no longer dramatic; it is lighter, and the twenty-year age difference between the actors in real life becomes sixteen within the film. And they don't even mention it.

Another aspect of love stories between an older woman and a younger man is always having to analyze and scrutinize such a difference, whether it’s in an ironic key as in Prime by Ben Younger, where Uma Thurman falls in love with her therapist Meryl Streep’s son, or more subtle and sometimes intricate to the point of pathology as in Two Mothers where Naomi Watts and Robin Wright fall for each other’s sons. In A Family Affair, the gender gap is noted and then promptly dismissed. For protagonist Zara/Joey King, the problem is not that her mother spends time with a celebrity nearly half her age, but that he is an egocentric narcissist who manipulates and lies to women. The usual playboy who wants you first and then dumps you, giving you a pair of diamond earrings. In being a harmless and sometimes funny rom-com, Richard LaGravenese's film is revolutionary; and the age-Kidman issue will surely resurface when Babygirl is released, an erotic thriller in which she plays a CEO who starts a relationship with a much younger intern, Harris Dickinson.

Perhaps only one other film could afford as much freedom from gossip and preconceptions: The Proposal in 2009, starring Sandra Bullock, who was forty-five at the time, and Ryan Reynolds, thirty-three. An executive editor-in-chief who forces her assistant to marry her to get a green card, promising him a future in publishing in return. From fraud, they move on to love, without any mention, except for one or two lines that glide by like oil, of the fact that they are twelve years apart. One of the best rom-coms since the 2000s, confirming Bullock's star dominance - another reason why it doesn’t matter if the protagonist is older than her co-star. In fact, in 2022, she starred in The Lost City, where her love interest is Channing Tatum, fifteen years younger - and it launched the now-hyperbolic Reynolds into orbit. Married since 2012 to Blake Lively, whom he met on the set of Green Lantern, they have four children together and an eleven-year age difference.