.

It took me a while to get into this film. It was nice enough seeing these two people start a relationship but if anything it was just too believable, aside from the conceit of her being a divorced mum and him a mid twenties member of an internationally mega successful boy band. It was sweet seeing them fall for each other but when it was just the two of them, with the context and to some extent the age difference put aside, there was nothing remarkable about it. There is no particular meet cute, they try one but it doesn’t quite land, and it’s all just a bit ordinary.

Then after a while, and I am talking ninety minutes into a two hour movie, it grows into something else though. For about fifteen minutes there, before it gets back to the standard love story, it is a thoughtful examination of age gaps within romantic relationships.

It is interesting that the fact she is older and he younger makes this more acceptable. We saw this in the Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings as well, where she is trying to seduce a teenage boy for financial gain. There was much discussion about how that film would never have been made if it had been a thirty something man and a young woman, and rightly so, and even in that film the driving factor of her being bribed to do it rather than actually just being attracted to him was part of what made it more okay.

Is it different the other way around though? Well yes it is because men do have a greater history of being predatory and lascivious toward younger women and in cases of peodophilia, which people understandably tie relationships like this to when the women are only just into adulthood, the perpetrators are more often heterosexual men. Of course women can also be abusive to young men and certainly not all older men in such relationships do so for selfish sexual gratification or misguided motivations around status, but there is a bigger state of affairs that is inevitably considered.

What the idea of you effectively shows though, is that it is possible for such pairings to be equal and loving. There is a powerful message against the idea that women become undesirable and get dismissed after forty here as well, which again also applies to men but not in the same way. Sure, that line from Barbie about how Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make the point about women feeling less beautiful as they get older comes to mind when the person in question here is Anne Hathaway but the idea lands nonetheless. Hathaway is after all a woman over forty. Curiously it is co-star Nicholas Galitzine who isn’t quite playing his age, being in reality five years older than the twenty four he is playing which actually puts them comfortably in the widely accepted ‘half your age plus seven years’ suitably bracket.

The movie also effectively examines the judgement that people have in this situation. It is writ large because the man is famous but this only serves to emphasise the treatment anyone would get. For the online news headlines think WhatsApp chatter, for the unkind looks in the street think people staring in your local Tesco and for the crowds of paparazzi think office gossip. Everyone who makes this choice is subject to unfair criticism and abuse because of societal expectations and this shows how that feels.

For this reason, while others are labelling this a middle aged woman’s fantasy and Harry Styles fan fiction, what I saw was a universal story of love in circumstances that exist in lots of people’s lives. This certainly made me examine my own prejudices and attitudes and it is actually a rare movie that has that impact.