Miscellaneous "Mother Mara" - when women love significantly younger men in movies
Women with younger lovers are not uncommon in the movies. But the subject still has an air of taboo about it. Recently, a striking number of films have dealt with the subject. "Mother Mara" is one of them.
20.03.2025, 14:36
20.03.2025, 14:37
SDA
Love relationships in the cinema have never suffered from strict restrictions due to age differences - especially when the man is the older one. After all, the average age gap between male actors and their on-screen partners fell from twenty to just under ten years between 1940 and today.
But then you hear stories like the one about the well-known 35-year-old actress who is considered too old for a role alongside a 55-year-old screen partner. Even if endless discussions can be held about the interactions between cinematic and social "normality", cinema is certainly not leading the way when it comes to the valuation of age in men and women.
It is treated casually when gray-haired gentlemen such as Humphrey Bogart, Alain Delon, Richard Gere, George Clooney or Woody Allen are accompanied by significantly younger women. It is quite different when women aged perhaps 50 have a romantic or sexual relationship with a 30-year-old man.
Love affairs between older women and younger men are not portrayed negatively in the movie per se. But such a relationship and the "unusual" age difference becomes the focus of the film, as something that has to be negotiated (and sometimes: overcome).
The films generously allow the women their second spring with young, muscular lovers, only to bring them back to their senses shortly before the credits roll. The woman has to end the relationship or be abandoned in order to find her way back to middle-class normality, where ideally children and a man of an appropriate age are waiting.
There have been several films on this topic recently - the latest, "Mother Mara", is now being released in cinemas.
"MOTHER MARA" (2024), AGE DIFFERENCE OF 32 YEARS: Mara, played by director Mirjana Karanović herself, is a single mother and successful lawyer in Belgrade. After the tragic death of her son, she closes herself off from her emotions and throws herself into work instead. She begins a moderately intense affair with Milan, a fitness trainer who was a friend of her son. The age difference between the two is not necessarily the focus here, just as their sexual encounters seem more therapeutically motivated than erotic. As an approximation to the son's world of experience, so to speak. Despite, or perhaps thanks to, her lover's rather pale performance, Mara manages to face her feelings in the end in order to begin a decent form of mourning.
"BABYGIRL" (2024), AGE DIFFERENCE OF 29 YEARS: The successful boss of a robotics company feels sexually unsatisfied in Halina Reijn's film. Her husband (Antonio Banderas) does not treat her with the desired intensity. But she herself is also unable to communicate her desires to him. So she starts an affair with the young trainee at her company, whom she had previously observed subduing an aggressive dog. It's all quite charged. Together with the chemistry between Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, this leads to intense and even slightly provocative scenes as the movie progresses. Which makes it all the more regrettable that in the end this outburst is just a heated detour back to bourgeois normality - then simply with better communication.
"BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY" (2024), AGE DIFFERENCE OF 27 YEARS: Despite some clichés, the fourth part of the saga about the now widowed Bridget (Renée Zellweger), directed by Michael Morris, deals with the topic in a surprisingly unbiased way. For example, the single mother's Tinder acquaintance is openly referred to as a "toy boy". When this boy named Roxter (Leo Woodall) first dramatically rescues a dog from the pool when he arrives at the garden party, only to take off his soaked T-shirt in slow motion and greet our protagonist with a heartfelt kiss in front of the bewildered, envious-looking party crowd, you can't help but feel happy for her. Bonus points for Hugh Grant as an eternally stubborn playboy who slowly realizes his embarrassment and lets the audience share in it.
"MAY DECEMBER" (2023), AGE DIFFERENCE OF 31 YEARS:This film by Todd Haynes, named after the English expression for relationships with a large age difference, is more uncomfortable and irritating (in a positive sense). At its core, it is about a long-term relationship between a teacher (Julianne Moore) and her former pupil, which began when he was 13 years old. Now the two have three children together. The two are visited by an actress (Natalie Portman). She is to play the teacher in a movie. She takes her research work very seriously. Almost all the nuances of power, abuse, desire and seduction are touched on without clarifying anything. A slightly unsettling masterpiece.
*This text by Dominic Schmid, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
