Welcome to Age Gap Autumn

Something is changing in the cinema landscape: we’re knee-deep in older women dating younger men. Almost 60 years on from Mike Nichols’ ​“transgressive” template The Graduate , it seems we can no longer log into a streaming service without seeing an Oscar-winning actress and her decades-younger lover.

The Graduate, though, was an outlier. For as long as movies have existed, it’s always an older man and a younger woman, the reverse a rare and entertaining fluke (Harold and Maude, How Stella Got Her Groove Back). This year, however, we’ve had The Idea of You, Lonely Planet and Between the Temples. Next year will bring us Babygirl, Marty Supreme, I Want Your Sex and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.

We could attempt to explore the greater psychological ramifications of age-hypogamous relationships but the reality might be simpler: allowing some of our finest actresses to be desired on screen by beautiful, younger men is, simply, hot – and fun.

In most of these films the women hold the financial power. In Lonely Planet, Laura Dern is slumming it opposite Liam Hemsworth. Nicole Kidman throws Zac Efron a bone in A Family Affair (and Harris Dickinson gets one, too, in Babygirl).

In real world terms, Anne Hathaway starring in The Idea of You helped kick Nicholas Galitzine’s career up a few notches. One Day​’s Leo Woodall will get his biggest movie role yet as Bridget Jones’s youngest lover. Meanwhile, starring opposite Timothée Chalamet in Josh Safdie’s upcoming ping-pong biopic Marty Supreme lured Gwyneth Paltrow out of semi-retirement. It’s notable that all of these women have Oscars, while their co-stars, in most cases, have yet to achieve that same prestige or power.

The composition of a young man and an older woman on-screen relationship pretty much guarantees that the woman gets star billing. And it’s turning into a cottage industry – one that helps polish the stars of A‑list actresses and wield their relative Hollywood seniority by giving a leg-up to a younger actor. If anything, it’s a refreshing change from seeing some of our greatest stars turn 40 and immediately get cast as the mother of a teenager.

Two categories of these films have emerged: pure fluff and something edgier. The bulk of them –The Idea of You, Lonely Planet, A Family Affair – are typical streaming fare, plasticky to the touch and unique only because they often contain Nicole Kidman. There’s not much grappling with the social taboo of these relationships, beyond, say, Hathaway’s character being branded a cougar by TMZ in The Idea of You. Lonely Planet doesn’t even touch on it. In A Family Affair, Kidman is at peace with shagging Zac Efron. It’s only Joey King, playing her daughter, who resents the relationship. Undoubtedly, this relative incuriosity about the consequences of these age-gaps is down to the fact that the likes of Kidman, Hathaway and Dern are Hollywood glamour personified. A younger man wanting to date them is hardly facing some kind of Sisyphean dilemma.

The Idea of You, meanwhile, is a kind of The Graduate redux, where we’re expected to believe Nicholas Galitzine’s pop star, a womb-fresh 28, is taking a huge risk by dating the divorcée played by Anne Hathaway, aged a moribund 39. On the other hand, there’s a genuine contrast in A Family Affair, where the elegant, birdlike Kidman looks slight against Efron’s Lego-figure build. You get why Kidman’s character, a 50-year-old novelist, would find danger and possibility in dating Efron, whose character in the film, like Galitzine’s, is an A‑list celebrity (in this case, a 34-year-old action star in the Dwayne Johnson mould).

These films are both pure wish fulfilment fantasy – The Idea of You author Robinne Lee partially based Galitzine’s character on Harry Styles. But by making Galitzine and Efron’s characters famous stars with clout who could ruin their girlfriends’ lives, these films are taking the easy route, one that fudges a dynamic interesting enough on its own – women possessing maturity and experience over a man – and gives it an unnecessary, glossy Hollywood twist.

The real meat is found in the films that dig deeper into the atypical narrative. In Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman, 44, plays a cantor who falls in love with a new student, his 70-something former elementary teacher (Carol Kane). In May December, Julianne Moore plays a 50-something homemaker married to the child she started grooming when he was 13 (played as an adult by Charles Melton).

Director Todd Haynes used the real-life Mary Kay Letourneau case as the basis for the May December, effectively lampooning Hollywood’s lurid, exploitative fetish for these types of cases. Natalie Portman co-stars as a vain actor set to play Moore’s character in a film, who preens, obsesses, and all but gets off on the tragedy of Melton’s character’s very real life. The underlying idea in May December is that the situation would have been treated with appropriate severity had Melton’s character had been a young white girl. We never witness Moore and Melton’s younger selves; we must instead hold the origin of their relationship in one hand and a supposedly happy family in the other.

Both films are about how age-gap relationships are perceived by the outside world, with May December leaning into the grotesqueness of Moore’s character, who has successfully escaped scrutiny through a lisp and a simpering persona. Between the Temples, on the other hand, underscores the bitter judgement Kane and Schwartzman’s tender relationship faces. There is nothing inappropriate about Schwartzman, a man in his 40s, and Kane, a woman in her 70s, falling in love, but their on-screen families crucify them for it. Unlike the complicit silence in May December, everyone in Between the Temples debates the central relationship. But there’s nothing inappropriate at play – simply unusual.

What separates these films from others about a younger man and older woman, is that they’re smart enough to understand that if genders were switched over, the optics and consequences would be completely different. The upcoming Babygirl, similarly, reframes the CEO-sleeping-with-his-employee trope by making said CEO Kidman and her intern Harris Dickinson. It’s about an abuse of power, a corporate affair we’ve seen time and time again with an ending we know is coming. But because it’s a woman this time around, we sit up.

With these varied interpretations of the older woman/​younger guy combo, we’re witnessing the needle move towards a status quo that’s just a fraction more transgressive than we’re used to. Most of these films are hardly collapsing unspeakable taboos, but they do spell a regime change in the kinds of on-screen dynamics considered appropriate. Mature women dating younger men as a narrative trope is interesting in its Hollywood unorthodoxy. Perhaps we’re starting to see its potential.