In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Nude Scene, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, 36 year old Diane Lane plays the much older seductress of 35 year old Olivier Martinez in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful.
When it comes to casting in Hollywood, age is a very nebulous concept, particularly when it comes to how women are portrayed. From the beginning of the industry, women have constantly been paired in romantic situations with men substantially older than them, sometimes while simultaneously serving as an object of desire for substantially younger men. One prime example comes in director Adrian Lyne's 2002 film Unfaithful, where 36 year old Diane Lane played wife to 52-year old Richard Gere, while also embarking on an affair with the "much younger" Olivier Martinez, who wasa scant one year younger than Lane.
What's fascinating about this film, and really any film with such egregious age differences between characters meant to be older or younger, is that mostviewersdon't even pay attention to this dichotomy. While there are certainly outliers and exceptions to this rule, this casting rule had been the standard in Hollywood for decades, never really going away even as audiences and performers grew weary of such trickery. Even the times this rule was turned on its head in films like The Graduate—where Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson is notably older than Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock—the reality was equally absurd. In this particular case, Bancroft was only 6 years Hoffman's senior despite playing at least three times that gap.
Granted the sixteen year age gap between Gere and Lane is nothing compared to the 24-year gap between Bogey and Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina or the nearly 40-year gap between Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment.Hell, Gere himself had an equally outrageous age gap two years earlier when he starred alongside Winona Ryder, 28 years his junior, in Autumn in New York. However, it's equally outrageous for Unfaithfulto intimate that Gere and Lane are around the same age, and especially insulting to suggest that she's significantly older than Martinez.
If you look through Lane's career, she's been playing MILFs since her early 30s, starting with 1999's A Walk on the Moon, where she was paired with the slightly more age appropriate Viggo Mortensen, born seven years before her. After a decade or so as the lead in many rom-coms like Under the Tuscan Sun, Must Love Dogs, and her reunion with Gere in Nights in Rodanthe, Lane almost instantly graduated to playing desexualized moms in everything from Batman v Superman to Trumbo. Thankfully last year's film Serenity allowed her to embrace her sexuality as an actual older woman, despite being an almost unwatchable mess of a movie.
In fact, were Unfaithful made today, it might make a bit more sense to cast Lane in the film than it did in 2002. That's not to say she wasn't terrific in the film at the time—she did earn her first and only Oscar nomination for the flick—but she's now substantially more age appropriate in terms of being wife to a 52 year old while also seducing a much younger 35 year old. It might have put the kibosh on her nude scenes, however, as she hasn't been nude on film since the aforementioned Must Love Dogs 15 years ago. That might have more to do with Hollywood standards than Lane's own willingness as an actress, as I'd happily pay to see Diane Lane nude right this minute—as would many of you, I presume.
Things could have been much worse, however, as a cursory glance at the women considered for the role of Connie in Unfaithful includes many actresses younger than Lane—Alyssa Milano, Angelina Jolie, Hilary Swank, Kate Winslet. However, reason clearly prevailed, and Lane won the role over her younger competition.In a profile on Lane in Entertainment Weekly just prior to the film's release, Adrian Lyne explains why he picked Lane over the others...
”Diane breathes a certain sexuality. But she’s sympathetic, and I think so many sexy women tend to be tough and hard at the same time.”
That is evident in nearly every frame of the film, particularly the scene where she rides the train home to her husband while still fantasizing about her bathroom encounter with her younger beau...
Age disparity in casting men and women hasn't exactly been fixed in the two decades since the film's release, but you're much less likely to see such insane age gaps between romantically entangled co-stars in 2020 than you were in 2002. One can only hope that as humans develop longer life spans, we can also see actresses playing sexually charged characters well into their 50s and 60s. Hell, I'd still give my left nut to bang Helen Mirren, and she's well into her 70s. Talk about an age gap.
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