We make the mental association and we can recoil from it.

They just, for the most part, don’t ever talk about sex, so I think we just don’t understand the need or desire even existing.”Įven deeper than this, suggests Dr Rebecca Jones, a lecturer specialising in older sexuality at the Open University in the UK, is that humans have what she calls “a psychological glitch – which is almost always down to us thinking about our parents or grandparents having sex.

“The warped view we have comes from when we are very young, I think, and our first relationships with older people are usually our grandparents. Mitchell calls the idea of later-life sex on screen “a taboo because it’s so rare” and Andrew Haigh has his own theory about why audiences can react with shock, and even disgust. But Baldwin and Streep were only in their fifties at the time of filming – as was Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give: hardly elderly. 2003’s Something’s Gotta Givedoes actually include a sex scene between the protagonists, played by Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, but the joke is that Nicholson’s character, ordinarily only interested in younger women, has to use Viagra.Īnother comedy, It’s Complicated (2009) keeps the rejuvenated sex life a pair of ex-spouses, played Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, almost entirely off-screen. Yet comedy is often the way Hollywood deals with older lovers. But it’s not played for laughs, and that’s crucial, because older people having sex shouldn’t be a joke.” “It’s important that the sex scene is realistic, it’s not fake and glossy, it’s Tom Courtenay’s ageing body in his underpants. “45 Years is a marvellous film and it shows this older couple as interesting individuals, engaged with the world, with active social lives, and so it follows that they might be sexually active as well,” Wendy Mitchell, contributing editor to trade daily Screen International, points out.

A wife and a mother sex scenes