If men went through the menopause, there would be countless important movies by male directors on the subject of “the change”. Picture Woody Allen casting Colin Firth as an author struggling with night sweats and hormonal mood swings, a gorgeous 21-year-old waitress mopping his clammy brow. In reality, cinema is almost entirely menopause-free.
When the French director Blandine Lenoir started shooting her life-affirming comedy-drama I Got Life!, a female producer asked if it was possible edit out the M-word. “It’s funny, because my producer is a young woman, a feminist. But she wanted me to tread carefully, to be discreet.” Lenoir pulls a face as if to say: this is the crap I have to deal with. “Menopause is a big taboo in France,” she adds. “It’s hard for women because we think we are old at 40. That’s the message from every movie, that you’re finished at 40. But you’re not finished at 40.”
You can see her point. In the youth-obsessed film industry, the life expectancy of female characters is lower than in the Middle Ages. The women over 45 we do see tend to be “gorgons and dragons”, as Meryl Streep once put it. Which is what makes I Got Life! such a hallelujah moment. Here, finally, is a film that portrays a recognisable woman in her 50s – Aurore, a divorced waitress living in a small French town. She is funny, has brilliant friends and is mostly happy with her life and body. But she increasingly feels invisible – especially after her idiot sexist boss hides her away behind the bar pouring drinks. “I wanted to do an everyday heroine, just like a woman you know in your day-to-day life, like the women I know,” says Lenoir.
Sitting next to her on a sofa at the offices of the Ciné Lumière in Kensington is the actor who plays Aurore, Agnès Jaoui – herself a respected director, who roars with laughter at the idea of being “discreet” about the menopause. The pair look every inch the stereotype of French women, dressed head-to-toe in black – chic rather than failsafe boring. Before the interview starts, they peer out on to the balcony, considering whether to ignore the “no smoking” sign.
Like a lot of female actors, Joaoui is in no mood to downplay her anger at misogyny in the industry. Last year, she sat alongside Jessica Chastain on the jury that called out the “disturbing” portrayal of women in films showing at the Cannes film festival. “There were no women of more than 50, more than 40, more than 30 in the films,” she says.
Lenoir started writing the script for I Got Life! when she turned 40, collecting stories from female friends who shared their experiences of age discrimination at work, the menopause and relationship breakdowns. “I was scared of getting older,” she confesses. “I’m still scared, but making the film helped. Getting old is terrible in some ways. But you just have to get on with it.”
One of the best things about I Got Life! is that men find Aurore hot. Why don’t we see 50-year-old women presented as attractive in more films? Jaoui shrugs: “As soon as a woman stops being fertile, she stops being sexy in films,” she says. “In France there has been research. Women completely disappear from the screens at 45 and they reappear to play grandmothers. You are not a mother any more and not a woman any more. Of course there are some actors, like [Isabelle] Huppert and [Catherine] Deneuve, but they are really a minority.”
When it comes to older women on screen, the industry tends to pass the buck, saying that audiences simply are not interested – to which Jaoui lets out a glorious Gallic “pah”. “That is stupid. It’s a complete lie,” she says. “Women go to the cinema, we buy tickets. What is true is that the people who make the decisions are mainly men.”
To prove her point, she explains the “ah-ha” recognition factor she has noticed among female audiences in France. “At the Q&As, a woman will stand up and say: ‘Hello, I’m 64 and I loved the movie.’ Then a woman will stand up and say: ‘I am 57, and I loved the movie.’ It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous. But Menopause Anonymous.”
