In the cinema, actors age ... but not their female partners

Love has no age, they say.

Certainly, but in the cinema it would seem that "the lover" has an expiry date which "the lover" seems to lack.

Actresses younger than the age of their role sharing the camera for a love story with much older actors, it is the overwhelming model of the heterosexual couple that fiction offers.

But today this representation of the actor who ages with the films but not his conquests, makes people cringe and, despite a stormy start, the film

by director Martin Bourboulon is paying the price of an invisibilization trial. older actresses.

"Actresses have very little room for maneuver"

Released just a week ago, the work takes us to Paris in 1887. Gustave Eiffel, aged 55 at the time, is played by actor Romain Duris, who is 47. His youthful love is , for her part, played by actress Emma Mackey who is only 25 spring.

This generational gap is however not justified by the scenario.

In real life, the creator of the tower bearing his name and the one who loved him, Adrienne Bourgès, were twelve years apart.

And not more than twenty, as in this fictionalized version.

22 years between Emma Mackey & Romain Duris, a small 10n between Adrienne Bourgès & Gustave #Eiffel.

It is this kind of representation that gives men carte blanche to seduce women of their daughters' age.

And why make older actresses invisible?

🤦🏻‍♀️

- Flore Maréchal (@FloreMarechal) October 15, 2021

“There are several things to note in this situation.

The first is the stereotypes associated with women, and in particular with actresses who must remain eternally young, thin and beautiful to meet the criteria of desirability of male looks.

This is all the more true when the person making the film is a man.

These injunctions leave very little room for maneuver to actresses, ”points out Éléonore Stévenin Morguet, co-founder of the

association

which is also a site listing, among other things, feminist films and series.

The room for maneuver in question, in other words the period when actresses work the most, represents, according to studies, a period of between six and eight years.

That is between 24 and 32 years old.

Going beyond the simple case of

, criticism has also been made on other films such as the latest James Bond,

shot in 2019 with a Daniel Craig then 51 years old and a Léa Seydoux of 34. Or again the next Ridley Scott,

, who will

Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Napoleon Bonaparte and Jodie Comer in that of Joséphine de Beauharnais.

The actors are 46 and 28 years old respectively, when the future empress was 6 years older than her husband ...

We heat up on the age difference Duris Mackey in #Eiffel but sharpen your tomawaks for the other joke to come: Ridley Scott in his Napoleon (played by Joachim Phoenix) chose a Joséphine de Beauharmais with 19 years younger than him when she was 6 more ... pic.twitter.com/bGzXqLR9tK

- Ophélie Latil (@ophelielatil) October 17, 2021

“After 35 years, actresses have a long tunnel in front of them until they become very young grandmothers on screen.

Only 6% of the roles go to actresses over 50 (

) and when the character is supposed to be in her fifties, it is a much younger woman who embodies it.

In the cinema, a 50-year-old woman has no wrinkles, no white hair.

She is frozen in time.

This is how actresses are invisible, it is also for this reason that spectators of this age do not identify themselves ", slices Éléonore Stévenin Morguet, who denounces here the consequences of the combo:" youthism "and" sexism " .

A manifesto for an age difference closer to reality

In 2015, at the age of 37, Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight, The Deuce) was deemed too old to play as a woman falling in love with a man of… 55 years old. This is what the American actress revealed at the time in an interview with The Wrap, a magazine specializing in the entertainment industry. “I was amazed. It made me feel bad, then angry, and then it made me laugh, ”explained the one who has just signed her first achievement, expected in December on the screens:

. A film in which the main role is played by Olivia Colman… 47 years old.

On April 11, 2018, the AAFA association (Actress, Actors of France Associés) had also published a manifesto which asks, among other things, "that the age difference in fictional couples be closer to the reality (two years in French couples, source Insee) when that does not change the meaning of the story. For example, when the male character is over 50, avoid granting him a companion twenty years younger ”.

Fabrice Eboué's film,

, which will be released in theaters on Wednesday, October 27, is in this respect very unique.

Romantic comedy "bleeding", even gore, starring a couple of butchers embodied by the director himself and Marina Foïs, the casting is an exception in the world of the 7th art.

Indeed, the main actor is 44 years old, the actress playing the role of his wife has blown out her 51st birthday.

An actress of more than 50 years who gives the answer to a younger partner and with whom a relationship of seduction is at stake, these images are extremely rare!