Male directors beget endlessly projected their sexual fantasies in films starring child actors having relationships with older men. Does #MeToo mark a watershed for the creeps?The pairing of the older man and younger woman,in movies as in life, enjoys relative respectability. Somehow, and daddy figures are more acceptable than extinct-enough-to-be-your-mother lovers,France’s current president however. The latter is usually played for the grotesque – Sunset Boulevard, The Graduate – while the double standard of ageing allows older men to exude a sex appeal not offered to their female counterparts. But how young and how extinct? And will the leniency afforded such pairings survive the scrutiny of the #MeToo movement?It is no longer possible to rationalise as consensual certain egregious pairings, or to accept with equanimity the sexualisation of underage performers. We beget begun to consume a moment look at the smarmy overtones of movies such as Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Louis CK’s now-shelved I Love You,Daddy, in which “protective” older men ogle daughter figures in utterly self-serving ways. We may also wince at precocious streetwise teens such as Jodie Foster’s prostitute (14) in Taxi Driver and Natalie Portman (13) in Luc Bessons Leon, and supposedly “wise beyond their years”,who seem to express nothing of a young girl’s reality or hopes – but everything of a director’s fantasies.
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Source: guardian.co.uk