The Idea of You

1hr 55mins (15)

Steamy romcom about a 40-year-old who falls for a boy band singer ★★★

“Anne Hathaway’s career in Hollywood began 23 years ago” in a film that dramatised a classic teenage girl fantasy, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post: in The Princess Diaries, she played a geeky young woman who discovers she is actually royalty. Now, Hathaway has delivered “a second dose of impossible escapism with The Idea of You”, a steamy Amazon Prime romcom in which she stars as Solène, a 40-year-old single mother who falls for Hayes, a 24-year-old pop star. Solène meets this Harry Styles-type character (Nicholas Galitzine), when she takes her daughter to Coachella, and stumbles into his trailer backstage, having mistaken it for a VIP toilet. “Sparks fly”, but she then flees and he has to track her down to the art gallery she runs in Los Angeles, thus setting in motion an unlikely “celeb-and-normie courtship”. The film has bundles of charm, a “smart script” and succeeds in large part thanks to Hathaway’s very “human” performance.

Hathaway and Galitzine do have chemistry, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but the story is “uneven” and “laughably predictable”, providing “loads of ‘rom’” and not enough “‘com’”. It might have been better, too, if Hathaway looked more credibly middle-aged. “As it is, she is beyond radiant, gleaming a lot brighter than all the younger females around her. So it’s no great surprise that Hayes goes weak at the knees” for her. This “ghastly” film was adapted from a “‘mummy porn’ novel” by the US writer Robinne Lee, and it throbs with “intense ‘fan fiction’ energy”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. If you were being kind, you might say there were hints here of Notting Hill or Roman Holiday. But you’re most likely to just wish you could demand your two hours back.