That age-old conundrum: why are men paired with women half their age in films?

Economic Times

a day ago

Casting decisions by filmmakers often take me back to my high school biology lessons about puberty and menopause. This knowledge has been useful as I've tried to wrap my head around the possibility of an 82-yr-old (say, Amitabh Bachchan) and a 51-yr-old (say, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) being brother and sister in reality.
This is not a random thought. I was led to it by the 2002 Hindi film, Hum Kisise Kum Nahin, in which director David Dhawan cast Amitabh and Aishwarya as siblings. Which got me wondering why such biological improbabilities - and in some cases, impossibilities - occur so frequently in our cinema.
The most striking recent example came in 2021 with the Malayalam film, One, starring Mammootty and Nimisha Sajayan as siblings. He is now 73. She, according to the internet, is 28. She looks even less. My first thought as a woman watching One was - Good heavens! That poor mother had periods for a minimum of 45 years.
Okay, okay. No more wisecracks about biology. Here's my point. These bizarre casting choices are driven by the same mindsets behind romantic pairings in mainstream films. Financiers, producers, and directors, by and large, assume that audiences do not want to see female actors who are past a certain age in pivotal relationships with male protagonists (barring as mothers, aunts, etc). Truth: these decision-makers themselves find older women less interesting. So do male superstars.
Such all-pervasive sexist ageism is what has now given us 70-yr-old Kamal Haasan playing 42-yr-old Trisha Krishnan's lover in Mani Ratnam's Thug Life. While in RS Prasanna's upcoming Sitaare Zameen Par (SZP), 60-yr-old Aamir Khan and 37-yr-old Genelia Deshmukh apparently play a couple. Kamal and Aamir are the producers of Thug Life and SZP, respectively. Angry fans tend to respond to such critiques of male stars by asking: Are you a mind-reader? How do you know what producers, financiers, directors and actors think? Answer: I've asked them. In 2001, after Gadar became a blockbuster, I asked Sunny Deol about the years that separate him and Ameesha Patel. As justification, Sunny pointed to similar age gaps between real-life couples. But Gadar was not pitched as an older-man-younger-woman romance. Besides, 15-40-yr age differences are not the norm in this country. But any outsider whose only exposure to India is through our mainstream cinema is likely to assume that the average Indian man is at least 20 years older than his wife/lover/partner.Years later, I posed the same question to Kamal in the context of his films. He replied that I should interrogate viewers instead about their preference for younger women. Not that male stars have given us concrete evidence gauged from market surveys. But if, indeed, they are right about viewers, it still merits the question: Why don't they use their tremendous influence to change attitudes? Besides, producers and directors across Indian language industries admit in off-the-record conversations that many male stars believe having a much younger woman as a screen lover or wife makes the man appear both younger and cooler. They don't want to be seen wooing or getting physical with women their age. By extension, if a woman young enough to be your grandchild plays your sister, perhaps you hope to convince audiences that you belong to her generation. Question 2 from fans: Aren't you being ageist towards men? No. I wish Amitabh, Mammootty, Kamal and Aamir careers that last as long as their lives. The issue is that the casting in their films devalues their women contemporaries, thus ensuring that no woman attains equivalent professional longevity. Aamir has been quoted in the press addressing criticism of SZP's casting. 'We have the advantage of VFX now,' he said, adding, 'Age is no longer a barrier for actors.' Lovely. Yet somehow, VFX was not deployed to make an 83-yr-old woman look 60 and cast her as the wife of the character he plays. Just saying.