Let's Talk About Babygirl.
Why are age-gap narratives featuring older women so scarce? Plus what to read if you liked Babygirl
As you probably already know, Babygirl is the new film written and directed by Halina Reijn, starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, in which Kidman plays a CEO who gets involved with a young intern. When I searched for “books like Babygirl movie,” Google returned dozens of romance novels, but only a handful of literary or mainstream fiction.
Nothing against the romance genre, but why must the subject of an age gap in which the woman is older be relegated to a single niche, while stories of relationships between older men and younger women have long been the norm in literary fiction and in film?
As a fan of the erotic thriller genre and of Nicole Kidman, I’m eager to see the film. In interviews, the director has called Babygirl a response to Eyes Wide Shut, which focused on the fantasies of Kidman’s co-star, Tom Cruise. Reijn wanted to focus on Kidman’s character instead.
“I want to know, ‘What if she would’ve gone and actually would’ve lived her fantasy?’ That’s what this is — my answer, playfully and humbly, to the male Eyes Wide Shut…”
I can’t wait to see it. But I do look forward to a time when the mere thought of an older woman with a younger man isn’t considered so…well, groundbreaking. The older-man-younger-woman dynamic is so expected and accepted that the respective ages of the male and female leads in such narratives often go unmentioned. Yet relationships involving an older woman are almost always considered subversive, as in Babygirl; or fraught with danger, as in the electrifying Paul Verhoeven film Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert; or transactional, as in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande or Saltburn.
I loved Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and I will watch anything with Isabelle Huppert (I even dragged my husband to the very long one-woman Isabelle Huppert period piece, Mary Said What She Said, at Theatre de la Ville in Paris in 2019—see the standing ovation above). But why are there so few films in which an age gap involving an older woman is neither subversive nor transactional? And so few novels outside the romance genre in which the age gap exists in ordinary rather than extreme circumstances? What if relationships between older women and younger men were treated with the same nonchalance, in film and literary fiction, as the reverse?
Of course, the imbalance may simply be a byproduct of the fact that older-man/younger-woman relationships are much more prevalent in society. Most couples I know are no more than two or three years apart in age, often because they met in college or immediately after college. In my family and friend circle, I know several couples in which the man is slightly older—my own husband, whom I met when in grad school, is six years older than I am. When we met, he was thirty and I was twenty-four, although he frequently reminds me that I implied I was twenty-six and he wouldn’t have dated me if he’d been aware of my real age. And to be fair, if I’d been single at thirty, I wouldn’t have dated a man six years my junior. Maybe film is simply reflecting the kinds of relationships we see around us.
On the other hand, we often go to movies and read books to enter a different world. Is the older-woman/younger man scenario so taboo that even filmmakers are reluctant to go there?
Tom Cruise can save the earth from aliens, but not with someone his own age: in Edge of Tomorrow, Emily Blunt was 31 and Cruise was 51. There’s a 39-year age gap between Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment, a 28-year old age gap between Emma Stone and Colin firth in Magic in the Moonlight, 26 years between Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets. The list is very long. You could create a whole subreddit of films in which a twenty-something Margot Robbie is involved with a forty-something leading man. Imagine any of these age gaps in the reverse; the movie would be about the age gap itself, and everything else would merely be subtext.
Age Gaps in Fiction (or Babygirl is Hard to Find)
In literary fiction, the most popular title featuring an older woman is The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves tops the Goodreads list. But this search result is misleading, because the “young man” in both novels is only 17 when he meets the female lead—not a man at all, but a minor!
According to reviewers, the young man in On the Island is an adult by the time the romantic relationship begins, but still…this just gets back to the larger question of extremes. Older-men/younger-women relationships in film and literature happen on your average Tuesday in anytown USA, while the reverse is justified only by extraordinary circumstances, like being marooned for life on a deserted island.
An exception is Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours, which features a forty-four year old woman obsessed with a thirty-one year old man—which is the sort of age gap almost no one blinks an eye at if the genders are reversed. But instead of accepting the mutual attraction, the narrator is terrified that the young man will discover her age, and she is equally terrified of looking her age. Okay, but…well, a 44-year-old who is afraid of looking her age is going to have limited appeal to a lot of over-44 women who buy books.
Fortunately, memoir provides more reality and more nuance. There is The Young Man by Nobel Prize recipient Annie Ernaux, which at a slim 64 pages, including a bio and notes from the author, is more a personal essay than full-fledged memoir. (I’ve previously written about Ernaux’s erotically charged nonfiction here).
There is also The Naked Truth by Leslie Morgan, in which a recently divorced woman on the cusp of fifty, recovering from a sexless marriage, decides to take five lovers in a year. The experiment begins with a man twenty years her junior whom she meets by chance in an airport. Unfortunately, the writing feels juvenile and the dialogue can be quite wooden, but at least the memoir presents an experience that defies the common narrative of the older woman aggressively pursuing a man. In Morgan’s case, it is usually the men who instigate the relationship.
I’ve never thought my job as a writer was to write the kinds of stories I can’t find, because you can find pretty much anything. This subject appears to be the outlier. So, for now, here’s the beginning of a novella.
The Beginning of Something
I was waiting outside the shop for an order of steamed pork dumplings. The place was a tiny storefront in a retail village on the outskirts of a southern city. It was just past noon. The sidewalk was still damp from a sudden rainstorm, though the sun was high and hot.