Lonely Planet and the surge of age-gap romances

"We have officially entered a MILF-aissance", said Hannah Jackson in Vogue. Since the critical success of "May December" last year, it seems as if "every studio executive worth their salt" is trying to tap into the "movie magic that only an older woman sleeping with a much younger man can create".

It's the season of heterosexual age-gap films, added Jodi Walker in The Ringer, and "you're not going to believe this" but "ladies are getting laid" – they're "crossing generational lines, and they're doing it all for the plot".

"Lonely Planet" is the latest in a long line of steamy romance films starring an older female lead. The action follows Katherine (Laura Dern) – a successful "50-something" novelist who has travelled to Morocco for a writer's retreat. Here she meets Owen (Liam Hemsworth) a "30-something finance guy" in the throes of re-evaluating his life choices.

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Soon the pair are "companionably walking around souks together wearing matching white shirts", said Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent. "An unlikely love story, you'll be shocked to discover, ensues."

'Romantic heroine treatment'

Dern is the latest of the "Big Little Lies" cast members to star in a "schmaltzy romance movie opposite younger leading men", said Rosseinsky. Back in 2017, Reese Witherspoon played an interior designer who falls for a much younger aspiring director in "Home Again", while Nicole Kidman recently played a widowed writer who began a relationship with a famous young actor (Zac Efron) in "A Family Affair".

While it sometimes feels that the plots for these films could have been "generated by AI", it's a genre that "I can't help but embrace". Even if they don't have the most "nuanced" plots, they are beginning to "challenge our expectations of older women and their visibility". Hollywood has shunned women over 40 for far too long and there's something "joyous" in seeing Dern and Kidman "both in their fifties, and absolutely at the top of their game, being given the romantic heroine treatment".

The stars of these rom-coms are "successful enough to afford a Nancy Meyers kitchen" and "autonomous enough to accept nothing less than they deserve", said Walker in The Ringer. It's about time there was a cultural shift; leading men have been dating co-stars "frozen in 27-year-old amber" for years. "Why shouldn't Laura Dern have a turn making out with Liam Hemsworth in an alleyway?"

'A tentative step forward'

Judging women who sleep with younger men as "sexual deviants" is just one of the many ways we objectify them, said Walker. And while reclaiming labels like "cougar" and "MILF" is "hard work", the more we see older women get "happily, hotly, hornily laid on screen", the more films start to reflect reality: that these women aren't "sad" or "lonely" – they're still "desired".

It's a notable shift from how women have historically been portrayed in films like the 2006 Cate Blanchett / Judi Dench classic adaptation of "Notes on a Scandal", in which the leading female characters are seen as "strange, self-delusional, at times monstrous creatures", said Adrian Horton in The Guardian.

The wave of lighter age-gap romances isn't massively changing who we see on screen (most of the leading women still look like Hollywood stars), but it's one of the more "interesting forays" into "expanding the palette of women's stories to the still-dreaded middle-aged".

Watching Dern "jaunting around Morocco with a Hemsworth brother is pure escapism", added Rosseinsky in The Independent. "But even if it's only ever so slightly pushing the boundaries of how women are presented on screen, it's a tentative step forward."