Independent Perspective News

Translation by Carolina Friszman.

Sigourney Weaver, Andie MacDowell or Catherine Keener act romances with young men in recent movies. The tendency tackles the subject liberally and, at the same time, questions old cultural taboos.

In Nicole Holofcener´s recent film, Lovely and Amazing, Catherine Keener interprets Michelle, a 36-year-old woman who´s bored, disappointed and, by the way, married. In one of the scenes she is caught making out with her 17-year-old boyfriend by his mother, who runs out of the house in her bed clothes to rescue her son from the evil seducer. Disheveled and disoriented, Michelle sees the furious mom looking through the car window and says the first thing that crosses her mind: She´s got the robe as mine!"

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Relationships between young men and older women are not an everyday thing in the movies. However, the issue was raised in several recent films: besides Lovely and Amazing there is Tadpole, by Gary Winick, featuring Sigourney Weaver, Bebe Neuwirth and Aaron Stanford, about a 15-year-old student who falls in love with his step-mother.

Igby Goes Down presents a sex scene between Amanda Peet, an international beauty, and Kieran Culkien, in the role of an idler at the militar academy. Although Peet is not that old, the defferent in age between them is considerable. The issue also appears in Crush, a British film in which Andie MacDowell plays a mature teacher involved in a passionate (an potentially long-term) relationship with a much younger former student.

The subject of couples made up by young men and older woman has been treated traditionally in the movies as a funny novelty (as in the depressive comedy with Andrew Mc-Carthy-Jacqueline Bisset Class, 1983) or as a warning story in which the boy learns his lesson and moves on, or just runs away (The graduate, 1967, the Mrs. Robinson interpreted by Anne Bancroft hunts young Dustin Hoffman).

But the lattest American movies showing this kind of couples suggests that although the issue is still somewhat taboo, filmmakers are ready to approach it as just another variation of the colorful world of romantic relationships.

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Most of the times, both in the movies and real life, relationships between young men and older women are still treated as a short phase.

Just like a woman can fall in love with somebody of a different race or social class, she can also fall in love with a guy who´s 20 years younger than her, or viceversa. Which partly explains movies such as Lovely and Amazing, which deal with this kind of couple as a something that is not the result of sociological fact, but or purely human causes, come out so refreshing. We all know love is a social matter, but although all love stories tell us something about our culture, the best of them are born from its characters´ usually dark motivations, or to be more precise, from that naughty character we call Cupido. The only right way to deal with this kind of relationship is treating them lightly, clearly and humorously, in order to see what´s fun and wonderful about them, as well as how complicated they are. That´s the only way to capture love´s wildly fleeting essence, a no matter at what age.