Love at 40: Hathaway, Galitzine get romantic in ‘The Idea of You’
There is something about a romantic comedy that uplifts the viewer like nothing else. Traditionally chronicling a quirky love story between two or more people, the genre often requires its audience to suspend disbelief just enough to open their hearts and allow for a bit of movie magic. Thankfully, as spring heats up and prepares to head into summer, Prime Video has a new rom-com to suit the seasonal mood.
“The Idea of You,” premiering Thursday, May 2, on Prime, puts just enough of a twist on the romcom genre to leave moviegoers feeling fresh this spring. Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by actress and author Robinne Lee (“Fifty Shades Freed,” 2018), “The Idea of You” stars Anne Hathaway (“Interstellar,” 2014) as 40-something French-American single mother Solène, who hits it off with 24-year-old pop star Hayes Campbell, played by “Cinderella’s” (2021) Nicholas Galitzine, when she accidentally walks into his trailer while accompanying her teen daughter to Coachella.
While, at surface level, the book (and its subsequent film) may appear to be a simple rom-com featuring a so-called “May-December romance,” in 2020, Vogue called the then three-year-old novel a “socio-cultural commentary about aging and a woman’s worth.”
“I wanted to write a novel that challenged certain myths,” Lee said in a 2017 interview. “[The myths] that female sexuality ceases to exist after we hit middle age; that having kids makes us no longer sexually attractive or viable; that women at a certain point in their lives — the point where they should be at their strongest and most prolific — become invisible.”
And after spending what is now more than a quarter-century in Hollywood herself, Lee says she feels much of that pressure herself, adding in a later interview with Vogue that sometimes “you want to just live the way you’ve lived when you were in college, or your early twenties when you have freedom and you never have to think of anyone but yourself.”
Solène definitely has a certain element of the carefree about her, but that side of Hathaway’s character plays counterpoint to a very grounded, much more mature sense of duty brought on by being a single mom and high-powered working woman in the art world. Although Solène’s daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin, “The Chair”), is older than in the book, the pair still encounter a fair bit of awkwardness regarding Solène’s famous young love, who is closer to her daughter’s age than her own.
Of course, it doesn’t help matters that Hayes, as the lead singer of the uber-popular boy band August Moon, constantly draws attention to his and Solène’s relationship just by being insanely famous.
Joining Hathaway, Galitzine and Rubin in “The Idea of You” are Reid Scott (“Veep”), Annie Mumolo (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” 2021), Perry Mattfeld (“In the Dark”), Jordan Aaron
Hall (“Rustin,” 2023), Cheech Manohar (“Mrs. Fletcher”) and new talent Mathilda Gianopoulos, who is the daughter of ‘80s rom-com legend Molly Ringwald (“Sixteen Candles,” 1984) and American author and editor Panio Gianopoulos. Irish talk show host Graham Norton (“The Graham Norton Show”) also makes an appearance in “The Idea of You,” starring as himself.
Don’t miss the opportunity to catch this love story for all ages — or at least those between the ages of 23 and 40 — when “The Idea of You” makes its streaming premiere Thursday, May 2, on Prime Video.