No spring chicken myself, I understand the appeal of those films in which ageing women go to extraordinary lengths to retain their youthful beauty. Way back in 1936, the opening scene of The Women was a fancy-schmancy health spa in which society matrons valiantly fought off wrinkles and turkey necks, at enormous expense. In 1959, under the tutelage of Roger Corman, director Jack Hill went the horror route, using a Leo Gordon script. Their focus was on a female cosmetics executive so worried about preserving her beauty that she broke into a scientist’s lab and stole an experimental serum, made from the royal jelly of queen wasps, that promised to reverse the ageing process. (Naturally, it didn’t end well.)
Just last year, a female writer/director, Coralie Fargeat, created a contemporary film in the same genre. The Substance. It featured a still-ravishing Demi Moore so determined to look younger that she went through a horrific metamorphosis that ultimately destroyed her life. Age (and its ominous implications in Hollywood) is also at the center of Sunset Boulevard, once a cinematic classic starring Gloria Swanson and now a Broadway hit musical with the gorgeous but not exactly teen-aged Nicole Scherzinger (she’s 47) in the leading role.
Given all this, it’s a pleasure to come across films in which a mature woman is hailed as a romantic figure, an actual love object. The only sad thing about these heroines is that they’re played by women who’ve recently left us. But oh, what a lovely light they shed on mature romance. Shirley Valentine is a delightful 1989 British film in which a middle-aged Liverpool housewife (the late Pauline Collins) is so taken for granted by her working-class husband and grown kids that she talks to the walls of her house—and directly to the film’s audience—about the good old days when she was filled to the brim with impish fun. By chance she’s invited by a friend who’s won a contest to join her for two weeks in Greece, and to Shirley’s own surprise she decides to go. On a sun-swept shore she revels in a new sense of freedom . . . even to the point of agreeing to a romantic sail with a handsome local who praises her spunk and her beauty The tryst turns out to have its disappointing side, but the upshot is that she discovers in herself a willingness to change the course of her life. Maybe she’ll resurrect her stale marriage, but on her own terms.
Then there’s Something’s Gotta Give, a lively Nancy Meyers comedy from 2003, in which a sixty-plus-year-old Jack Nicholson plays Harry, a wealthy music exec who thrives on courting pretty women half his age. Through a series of complications involving his latest flame, Marin (Amanda Peet), he ends up having a mild heart attack at the beach cottage of her divorced mother, Erica (the late Diane Keaton), who’s an ultra-successful playwright. The upshot is that, when Marin returns to work in the city, Erica is stuck babysitting the recuperating Harry. At first they are constantly getting on each other’s nerves. But then, to their mutual surprise, they fall hard for one another, reveling in their mutual smarts and maturity. And yes, their mutual sex drive. Still, Harry’s commitment-phobic, and the adorable Erica finds she has another admirer, the handsome and very young doctor played by Keanu Reeves. Not bad for a fifty-something-year-old who even carries off a very embarrassed but extremely funny nude scene. Nice indeed to think that a woman of Keaton’s years could be so desirable.
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