By Evridiki Fatolia,
The new romantic comedy starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine is about Solène Marchand, a divorced art gallery owner from Los Angeles who is attending the renowned music festival “Coachella” with her ex-husband Daniel and their daughter Izzy. There, she meets Hayes Campbell, 24-year-old musician, and they fall in love, but Solène is uneasy with their affair. Hayes, a member of August Moon, purchases every piece in her gallery and invites her to accompany him on his European tour. They have sex at hotels and get uneasy about her age in comparison to the other women. After paparazzi images surface, Solène and Hayes revive their love and date publicly. Daniel queries her about their relationship, which she denies. After a vacation to New York, Hayes returns, and they decide to break off their relationship. However, Hayes suggests that they reevaluate their relationship in five years, once Izzy finishes school. Five years later, Hayes appears on The Graham Norton Show and returns to the gallery for a bittersweet reunion.
When the first stories about the plot were published, everyone believed that the story is about the short romance between Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde. The two celebrities first met on the set of Wilde’s film Don’t Worry Darling in October 2020, when Harry Styles was selected to replace Shia LaBeouf as the starring actor. According to many sources, their relationship did not remain professional and platonic for too long, as they reportedly started dating before January. During 2022, the couple seemed to be more public with their relationship, unafraid of the paparazzi’s attention. Their arrival to Venice Film Festival in September 2022 in separate boats sparked, at last, their breakup rumors.
While the comments about her work on the movie were really encouraging for the director, in reality Olivia Wilde had to confront a bunch of hateful comments about her age, her body and her children, as if these had anything to do with the movie or her relationship with Styles. Everyone was looking and scouring the Internet for evidence that she had cheated, counting how many years the age gap is between her and her then partner and what she wanted from a young boy like Styles, what she could possibly have to “trap” him like that. This is a small sample of what she endured during this relationship. Maybe the public was not really ready to accept that a guy like Styles can fall for a woman like Olivia. One of the few times reality imitates movies didn’t go as expected. And this goes to show that whatever is accepted and even admired as fiction in movies, is scrutinized and plagued by sexist opinions in real life.
Reference
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Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde: A Complete Relationship Timeline. Glamour. Available here
