I watched The Idea of You on Amazon Prime yesterday. For those of you who are not chronically online, the film is about a 40-year-old mother of a teenage girl who embarks on a love affair with a member of the world’s biggest boyband, Harry Styles Hayes Campbell. I read the book during the pandemic and while they changed the age difference and made the sex scenes less kinky, (justice for all the lil freaks out there) the movie adaptation is still sweet, sexy, and deeply satisfying. Anne Hathaway has genuinely never looked better – her hair! Her skin! The clothes! 10/10 recommend.
Because Solène is such a smoke show, there’s never any doubt in your mind about why a 24-year-old popstar would be so attracted to her. But there’s an interesting scene in the film where she and Hayes board a private plane together to join the rest of the band and their various girlfriends/hookups. They all instantly clock that Solène is older and their reactions are almost comical. This isn’t an original or new thought but it did make me imagine if the genders were reversed – would anyone do a doubletake if a 40-year-old rockstar boarded that plane with a 24-year old woman in tow? Would a 40-year old man insist, as Solène does when she and Hayes first kiss, that “I could be your father” and “you’re too young for me”? (To be fair, some men definitely would! It’s a big age gap, regardless of gender. But I don’t know if the line would feel as urgent or as raw as it does when Solène says it.) When I was thirty, I was seeing a man who was in his early forties and not one person in my life commented on it, or asked if he was too old for me. But today, if I said I was considering dating a 27-year-old, I know many of those same