\n<\/p>\n
The older woman has been very busy lately. By \u201colder woman,\u201d I am referring to the cinematic figure who is defined by her sexual and romantic relationships with younger men. Depending on your own age, you may know her as the \u201ccougar,\u201d the \u201cMrs. Robinson,\u201d or the joke about \u201cyour mom.\u201d Now she is the protagonist. And she has never had so many scene partners to choose from.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s review her banner year. In a succession of streaming romance films, she was wooed by a boy-band member (\u201cThe Idea of You\u201d), an action movie star (\u201cA Family Affair\u201d) and a finance bro (\u201cLonely Planet\u201d). For Christmas (having been very good all year), she got a starring role in the erotic thriller \u201cBabygirl\u201d as a robotics company executive who fell into a submissive sexual relationship with her new intern \u2014 and fixed her life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The bounty of the older woman\u2019s recent plots, and the complexity of her new arrangements, come as a thrill, and a relief. For so long, the movies have flattened her into a villain or reduced her to a joke. They have paired her with weasels and virgins. She has been made to manipulate young men because she is pathetic or insane. She was less a character than a stand-in for the movie\u2019s themes \u2014 a symbol for some form of generational rot or another.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Now, she can still be a monster (as in Catherine Breillat\u2019s \u201cLast Summer,\u201d where she is a defense attorney with a sadistic streak who pursues her teenage stepson). Occasionally she\u2019s a victim (as in \u201cDisclaimer,\u201d the limited series about an investigative journalist ensnared by a depraved teenage tourist). But increasingly she is a person in a nuanced relationship. Her personality has been cleansed of the too-obvious psychological tics (alcoholism, narcissism, delusion) used to explain her unseemly propositions. These days, it is often the young man who comes on to her. He has become the blunt tool for revealing the depths of her shifting character.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The older woman archetype is as old as film itself. In the 1927 silent film \u201cCradle Snatchers,\u201d she takes the form of a trio of wives who \u2014 frustrated by their husbands gallivanting with young women \u2014 pay young male escorts to make them jealous. (\u201cWe don\u2019t have to neck \u2018em, do we?\u201d one of the repulsed boys-for-hire asks). In her original design, the older woman\u2019s only power is her own shrewishness, and the depths she will sink to browbeat her spouse or lover into compliance. In the 1950 classic \u201cSunset Boulevard,\u201d as Norma Desmond, she was inflated into a comic and tragic character, a former movie star who plunges into a delusional decline.<\/p>\n
In 1967\u2019s \u201cThe Graduate,\u201d as Mrs. Robinson, she scrambled to a slightly higher perch, representing a legitimate sexual threat. Her wardrobe of animal prints marked her as an apex predator and predicted the rise of the term \u201ccougar\u201d to describe women like her. Then, in 1999\u2019s \u201cAmerican Pie,\u201d as Stifler\u2019s mom, she was declawed and packaged as a leggy mascot who inspired a mommy-themed pornographic category, one that would be used to contain all the older women who came after her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The older woman character has been unleashed before \u2014 see her triumphs in the kooky \u201cHarold and Maude,\u201d the misty \u201cHow Stella Got Her Groove Back\u201d and the fizzy \u201cSomething\u2019s Gotta Give\u201d \u2014 but she has always been at risk of being yanked back into her cage, dismissed again as a desperate animal. Now she is presumed to be an attractive human. As her new movies redirect our sympathies, they tap fresh sources of tension. Sometimes the dated \u201colder woman\u201d archetype itself becomes the specter haunting these movies, forcing our players to vanquish its distortions in order to finally forge an honest relationship on equal ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Even in the casting stage, you can see why these new arrangements work. Many of Hollywood\u2019s best actresses are over 40, and they are often now producers, digging up projects suitable for their talents and partnering with female writers and directors to develop them. Frankly, they are running out of men who can keep up. Now it feels as if a casting director has spun a gigantic wheel to generate unexpected romantic pairings. Anne Hathaway (42 when she made \u201cThe Idea of You\u201d) with Nicholas Galitzine (30 at the time)? Yes. Nicole Kidman (57 in \u201cBabygirl\u201d) and Harris Dickinson (28)? Yes, please<\/em>. Laura Dern (57 in \u201cLonely Planet\u201d) and Liam Hemsworth (34)? Absolutely not, but spin for Laura again, let\u2019s give her another shot!<\/p>\n As for the men: They\u2019re hot now. The older woman has too often been paired with losers, signaling her own diminished status. Rewatching \u201cThe Graduate\u201d recently, I was struck by what a sniveling twerp Benjamin Braddock is \u2014 a listless man-child who only becomes vaguely interesting when he shares a scene (and bed) with the strange and alluring Mrs. Robinson. In these new plots, the older woman\u2019s suitor might be a famous pop or movie star. Or an unexceptional finance guy who is nevertheless built like a famous Hemsworth brother. And if our older woman has a daughter closer to his age, he is studiously uninterested.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yes, the older women slotted into these plots are typically thin, white and expertly dermatologically preserved. But so was Anne Bancroft (and she was only 35!) Something has shifted, where we\u2019re finally allowed to recognize a Hollywood feminine ideal for what it is. In \u201cSunset Boulevard,\u201d Norma pursues bizarre beauty treatments with a comic absurdity. In \u201cBabygirl,\u201d Romy\u2019s executive regimen is also depicted as a gantlet of zaps and jabs, with results that provoke her daughter\u2019s mockery and her intern\u2019s uncomfortably close interest. After he spies a new injection under her eye, and teases his approval, we watch an assistant apply concealer, tending to Romy\u2019s face as if after a prizefight. Now beauty work reveals our protagonist\u2019s vulnerability, and stokes intimacy with her love interest, too.<\/p>\n The new older woman, by the way, does not generate her power from snagging the younger man. She sources it herself. She runs a chic gallery, or writes best-selling novels, or chairs a robotics company she founded. Her experience with sex (and dating, marriage and child-rearing) is not a trade secret that she lords over some poor virgin. It is a well of life experience that she is not eager to surrender to an unserious young man. She uses her sexual experience not to ravage his body but to protect her heart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There used to be something wrong with the older woman, but now there\u2019s often something off about her younger man. In \u201cThe Idea of You,\u201d Hathaway\u2019s character is pursued by Galitzine\u2019s boy-bander only to discover that he has a history of older girlfriends, and a romantic playbook for snagging them. When the tabloids catch on, and call her a \u201ccougar,\u201d she decides he\u2019s not worth it. The problem isn\u2019t that she\u2019s too old, but that he is too young. (She makes him wait five years for another date, and he shows up just after she turns 45). In \u201cA Family Affair,\u201d a similar plot unspools, and in the end a preening movie star (Zac Efron) must win back his older writer crush (Kidman again) by entering unfamiliar territory \u2014 a grocery store.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Those are rom-coms, so their trivial romantic mismatches are resolved by the film\u2019s end. But in the erotic thriller \u201cBabygirl,\u201d the stakes are always shifting, and unresolved questions of gender and power drive the film\u2019s plot and pervade its soft-B.D.S.M. sex scenes. When Romy begins a relationship with her intern, Samuel, she exploits the height of the corporate power differential. She\u2019s the elder boss, but he is an unnervingly confident young man who floats easily through the business world and \u2014 as he reminds her \u2014 can always expose their arrangement, break up her family and derail her career. Samuel describes their sexual dynamic as \u201chanding power back and forth,\u201d but he could be describing the appeal of the film itself.<\/p>\n The punishment exacted on older women in past stories \u2014 the black mark society would apply to Romy if she was found out \u2014 becomes the backdrop for their erotic game. In the 1983 comedy \u201cClass,\u201d in which an exquisite Jacqueline Bisset plays a kind of manic pixie dream mom who improbably pursues the dough-faced prep school kid Andrew McCarthy, our older woman disappears into a psychiatric institution. In \u201cSunset Boulevard,\u201d she is led off to jail. In \u201cThe Graduate,\u201d her affair partner runs away with her daughter, who makes a crack about Mrs. Robinson\u2019s age as she flees.<\/p>\n One of the pleasures of \u201cBabygirl\u201d is its exploration of how power is always performed \u2014 in their sadomasochistic affair, and their age-gap relationship, but elsewhere, too. Romy\u2019s corporate act is significantly more complex than her male peers. She is advised to appear \u201cnurturing\u201d and cutthroat, to possess \u201cemotional intelligence\u201d alongside actual smarts. At home, she wears an apron at the kitchen table and acts the sexually liberated wife as she fakes an orgasm with her husband. Power \u2014 in the corporation, the family, the secret sex hotel \u2014 is make-believe. Samuel\u2019s the only one direct enough to tell her to loosen up.<\/p>\n Kidman has been playing the older woman for more than 30 years. In \u201cTo Die For,\u201d the 1995 erotic thriller written by Buck Henry (of \u201cThe Graduate\u201d) and inspired by the real-life murder conviction of Pamela Smart, Kidman was a 20-something TV weatherperson who seduces a teen to kill her husband. Why? Because she is crazy. Kidman is hypnotic in the role, but she is less a person than a projection, an indictment of tabloid culture and a lesson on the degradations of fame.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Todd Haynes\u2019 2023 film \u201cMay December\u201d \u2014 which also plays with tabloid interest in real-life older-woman narratives, and their Hollywood derivatives \u2014 these ripped headlines are capably rearranged into something new. The same can\u2019t be said for \u201cDisclaimer,\u201d an Apple streaming series in which the investigative journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) discovers a mysterious unpublished novel distributed among her family and friends. The novel claims to expose a dark incident from her past, revealed in fantasy flashbacks: In it, a married journalist (a younger version of Catherine) encounters the young tourist Jonathan on a beach vacation, seduces him, and then allows him to drown in the ocean in order to protect the secret of her affair. The book\u2019s readers delight in the older woman\u2019s punishment: death.<\/p>\n In the novel, the Catherine character is cartoonishly evil, and we must watch the surfaced tale destroy her family and career until we reach the perspective-shifting ending, where we learn that \u2014 spoiler alert \u2014 it was in fact the cartoonishly evil young Jonathan who pursued Catherine, then brutally raped her for hours before he drowned. It\u2019s a testament to how much mores have changed that the twist plays as so predictable. At this point, we\u2019ve all grown out of that material, haven\u2019t we?<\/p>\n Images at top: Clockwise from top left, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in \u201cBabygirl\u201d (Niko Tavernise\/A24); Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth in \u201cLonely Planet\u201d (Anne Marie Fox\/Netflix); Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine in \u201cThe Idea of You\u201d (Prime); L\u00e9a Drucker and Samuel Kircher in \u201cLast Summer\u201d (Sideshow\/Janus Film ).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n