Mary Consolata Keneema

What on Earth did I just watch? What a mess. Terrible movie. The whole story line is all over the place. So poorly written. Terrible. I cannot remember the last time I watched something this bad?

This movie is symbolic on so many levels. It is so much more than just a cougar-meets-boy story. So many of us have judged older women for dating much younger men. The list is long but Emmanuel Macron and more recently, Aaron Tyler-Johnson come to mind. This movie lets you look at such relationships from their inception. The older woman in question, played by Anne Hathaway, is reluctant at first. She knows she will be judged and she fears how people will react. She even refers to how she judged her own husband for cheating on her with a younger woman. She is not some blood-thirsty vulture who went hunting for a younger man. This was not her plan. It happened organically, naturally. A bond was made between two people who deserved to be happy. It doesn’t matter what happened to them before they met, what’s important is that they met when they did. And the way they met is also important. She was not supposed to be there that day. Her ex-husband had cancelled his commitment to take his daughter to Coachella. She had to take her daughter at the last minute. Because she always putting her daughter first, she was rewarded for it. It was serendipity, it was fate. She met the love of her life. And their bond was genuine. But the world tried to tear them apart. This movie highlights the fact that the world does not have to be strangers on the internet. Even close (fake) friends, relatives, people around you, will try to dim your shine. Sometimes they do it unknowingly by projecting their own insecurities on you. In this movie we get to see the other side of the story. Not the story from the perspective of the media. In the movie, amidst the backlash of them becoming an official item, one comment on social media says that the cougar’s daughter is hot and that he should be dating her instead. Mind you, the cougar’s daughter is 16 so this commentator, blinded by their unprovoked rage, thinks it’s a better idea for the young man to date the daughter, who is underage, rather than the mum? This young man is young but he’s not a child. He is a fully grown adult. He is twenty-four years of age. But with the over-emphasis and stigmatisation of their age difference, you would think that he was a minor. This movie opened my eyes to my own prejudices about older women who date much younger men. I got to see this relationship from a more humane point of view. The only crime this fully consensual and very adult couple made was to love and to want to be loved, understood, seen and cherished. Two people with vastly different backgrounds, found each other. They found solace and companionship in each other. Shame on us for trying to cheapen and sexualise their relationship. What they had was real. What they had is the very definition of what a relationship should be. But we are so blinded and brainwashed by the façade of polite society.