A Banner Year for Moms Gone Wild

Older women. Younger men. It’s a thing.

Wasn’t it always a thing, you might ask? Mrs. Robinson may have some thoughts on the matter.

But it appears to have become even more of a thing this year, if the number of films featuring older women in romantic entanglements with younger dudes is any indication.

The Idea of You was a massive hit, becoming the most streamed movie on Amazon Prime Video in the first week of its release and garnering a coveted 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Babygirl debuted at the Venice Film Festival, with its star Nicole Kidman picking up a Best Actress award.

The cinematic universe of age-gap affairs is large and accommodating. The many different takes on the older-woman-younger-man trope, from white bread rom-coms to darker materials, all kinked up and ready to roll, speak to the appetites of audiences, but they also indicate another, more complex cultural phenomenon.

The central conceit of many of these films is a middle-aged woman who seems to have it all together. She’s got a career, a husband, a family and a busy life. But underneath lies a wish to lose control, abandon propriety and jackknife the straitjacket that is conventional existence. Sex is the conduit, but the result is a kind of liberation.

Which begs the question: Are the usual markers of a successful life just another kind of prison, albeit one with nice curtains, granite countertops and a soaker tub?

Many of the characters in these films want their sexy cakes and countertops too. And really, who can blame them?

Nicole Kidman starred in two different films this year that explore May-December relationships: Babygirl and A Family Affair. Taken together, these two might convince you that hell isn’t a woman scorned, but a woman horned.

At age 57, Kidman is at a point in her career where she teeters on the edge of desirability, either cast as a female lead or relegated to character roles. To make sexy hay while the sun still shines might be part of the impetus behind these two films.

In Babygirl, Kidman plays a driven executive named Romy Mathis who heads a giant robotics firm. Married to a theatre director (played by Antonio Banderas) and the mother of two teenagers, her life is scheduled down to the millisecond as she navigates the demands of work and family life.

On the surface, things look under control. But as the film’s opening scene makes clear, not everything is as hunky-dory as it might first appear.

Even before we see it, sex is clearly happening, as implied by the various groans, moans and panting (note to self: watching this film with closed-captioning was perhaps not the wisest move). There’s Kidman, astride Banderas, getting down and dirty. After they’re done, she rises from their marital bed, saunters naked down the hallway and then makes a mad dash for her laptop, where she cues up some kinky porn and masturbates to genuine orgasm.

The film drops a few clues here and there about why Kidman’s character may be experiencing erotic repression, including the fact that she was raised in a cult. Things come to a head with the entrance of a young intern named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who gets paired with Romy as part of her company’s mentorship program.

The pair meet cute on the street outside of Romy’s office building when Samuel brings an aggressive dog under control before it can attack her. It doesn’t take long before kinky power games are on the table, with Romy and Samuel circling each other like gladiators.

Anyone who came of age on erotic thrillers like 9 1/2 Weeks or Basic Instinct knows the drill. Carnal desire and the thin edge of actual violence skate along together until the characters are forced to confront the true nature of their relationship.

In the case of Babygirl, there are other power dynamics at play, including the cutthroat business of the corporate world.

As Romy fends off ambitious youngsters and predatory old men, as well as the ongoing threat of losing her looks and power, you can see why she might want to drown herself in some kinky sex and indulge in a horny holiday from reality.

But the truth of being an older woman, with all its attendant complexities and compromises, is always there, just waiting.

Is this transgression?

One of the most painful moments in Babygirl takes place during a photo shoot for the family Christmas card. Fresh from the dermatologist, where she has endured Botox injections without any numbing cream, Romy’s frozen forehead and trout pout are ruthlessly mocked by her teenage daughter. It’s a reminder of the work we all do in endlessly policing female bodies so they retain some semblance of youth. To retain some value is the underlying message.

The many scenes that feature Kidman’s strikingly thin naked body bring on an extra layer of meaning. Even as the character she’s playing is fighting off old age, the actress herself is equally engaged in the same struggle.

Director Halina Reijn owes a debt to other filmmakers like Catherine Breillat, but Babygirl lacks the genuine transgressive bite of earlier works like the controversial 2023 thriller Last Summer, no matter how many sex scenes in grotty hotel rooms are packed in.

The sexual politics of Babygirl are at best muddled and at worst regressive. Still, Kidman gives it her all. Much has been made already of the actress’s commitment to her role, which includes some grunting orgasms and a little light debasement such as dunking her entire face in a saucer of milk. It’s a distinct step away from her other romantic role-in with Zac Efron.

For all the kink on display in Babygirl, there is something far creepier at work in A Family Affair, with its faintly incestuous title, ham-fisted plot and almost painful lack of chemistry between the two leads.

The romance at the film’s centre is akin to bonking two pieces of wood together in order to start a fire. What you get is a load of unsexy sawdust. Kidman falls in love with her daughter’s employer, a vain and vacuous movie star played by Efron. The scenes of the two romping about, having beach picnics and wearing woolly sweaters and sucking, just plain sucking, are, quite simply, the worst.

But again, I would gladly take both of these not-very-good films over Anne Hathaway getting it on with a boy-band superstar in The Idea of You.

Hathaway seems to irk folks in a way that few actresses do, maybe because everything she does rings slightly false, or at least overly mannered and self-conscious. Despite the film’s box office success and popularity, I must confess, I found Hathaway’s performance grating in extremis.

In The Idea of You, Hatha-her-way is an L.A. gallerist named Solène Marchand, with a teenage daughter, a fancy house and no discernible interest in a romantic relationship, after her former husband leaves her for a much younger woman.

After being stuck with taking her daughter and her friends to the Coachella music festival, where boy band August Moon is playing (the parallels to the real-life boy band One Direction are obvious), Solène meets lead singer Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine) after accidentally waltzing into his trailer to use the washroom.

To be fair, there are some interesting ideas about celebrity and influencer culture in The Idea of You, but rom-coms present a limited lens through which to explore the big issues. Anything too complex gets squished flat underneath the scenes of slightly older beautiful people finding love with other equally beautiful younger people.

The same can be said of Lonely Planet, in which Laura Dern sparks up with Liam Hemsworth.

It’s pretty much the same story: exotic locations, burnished sunsets, fancy hotels and lots of angst along the lines of “Oh, we can’t do this! OK, let’s do this.”

The fantasy... and reality

So, what’s behind all these movies featuring middle-aged women bedding young bucks?

Is it simply that men are so problematic, the women who are their peers have been forced to venture further afield and, notably, down the decades, if they want to pluck or be plucked?

The orgasm gap between men and women has grown into a canyon, and into this enormous hole Hollywood is only too happy to pour out films that will at least attract audiences.

There have certainly been May-December films before (hello, White Palace, Bull Durham and the patron saint of horny older women, one Susan Sarandon).

What makes this new crop different? It isn’t just the orgasm chasm that has complicated relationships, as the political divisions between men and women have continued to grow.

In selling sexual fantasies to women in the year of our Lord 2024, a blanker canvas in the form of a younger man is useful. As the daughter of Anne Hathaway’s character asks in The Idea of You, “Is he a feminist? Cuz that’s important here.”

Leaving aside culture war stuff, films still need to make money, and women are increasingly the larger demographic when it comes to film-going. So, it’s only logical that films might reflect the things that are compelling to women, for good and for bad.

Which brings me to The Substance. While not exactly in the same category as the other films mentioned, The Substance clearly examines issues that women can relate to. The fear of aging, of irrelevance, the need to remain desirable. Hot, in other words.

What is only hinted at in the other 2024 offerings is rendered explicit in The Substance, where Demi Moore, herself something of an age-gap queen, plays a 50-something actress who gets turfed from stardom and makes a deal with the devil.

Conceived as something of a dark — pitch-black, in fact — fairy tale, The Substance is the story of an aging actress, Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore), who attempts to cling to fame through an experimental treatment that allows her to split into a younger version of herself.

“Split” is the operative word, as the other self (played by younger actress Margaret Qualley) emerges from Sparkle’s spine in a body-horror moment for the ages.

The caveat is that Elizabeth must return to her old self every two weeks, lest there be less-than-desirable repercussions.

As you can imagine, things do not go as planned.

The scene that renders the struggle a little too real takes place when Moore’s character is getting ready for a date.

Every time she looks in a mirror, she finds fault with her face, smearing on another layer of blush or coat of lipstick before rubbing it off and starting again. It’s not pretty, but that’s kind of the point.

It also calls to mind Amy Schumer’s infamous sketch video series “Last Fuckable Day” featuring actresses Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Rosanne Arquette and Tina Fey.

They sit around a food-laden table, drinking, laughing, farting and chugging melted ice cream. Overall, just having a riotous old time celebrating their liberation from the need to be sexy.

In the process, of course, they are wildly sexy.

Can women have it both ways? Or is that another double entendre?

Maybe, but it’s never been easy being a woman. So let’s not make it any harder. Perhaps one of the reasons for the current onslaught of older-women-and-younger-men movies is that women just need a break from having to be all things to all people all the time. A few more orgasms would be nice as well.