Anne Hathaway gleefully romances a boy-band hunk in The Idea of ...

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Anne Hathaway vehicle The Idea of You is mere inches away from being a manipulative audience-pleaser, with its fantasy-fulfilment story of a 40-year-old woman having a passionate romance with a much younger pop star hunk. So why does it feel as if it has integrity and genuine heart? It might be because director/co-writer Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) treats the material, from Robinne Lee’s novel, with intelligence and respect; or it might be the quietly simmering chemistry between Hathaway and co-star Nicholas Galitzine. But it’s also the idiosyncratically expressive physiognomy of Hathaway herself. When she smiles — teeth flashing, outsize eyes open wide — she actually looks as if she’s having a great time, which makes her character’s downbeat moments all the more affecting.

Hathaway’s face and self-deprecating wryness here fit a protagonist who, for much of the time, is reacting with delighted amazement to what’s happening to her. She plays Solène, a divorced LA gallerist who accidentally encounters singer Hayes (“the English one”) from boy band Autumn Moon. Their cautiously amused click slowly becomes a passionate liaison, conducted in surreptitious jet-setting luxury.

Eventually their relationship is discovered, and a film that starts out breezy takes a sobering turn: not only do Solène’s daughter and rebarbative ex-husband object to her keeping a secret, she also faces a deluge of public hate (“Yoko Ono 2.0” is the tip of the poison iceberg).

The film has a light touch handling the ageism, misogyny and general misunderstanding that Solène faces. And while Galitzine’s coltish posh boy is initially callow, his liaison with Solène gradually brings Hayes out as a smarter, more self-aware creature, a worthy (and sensitively acted) object of her attentions. This is too fluffy to be quite the 21st-century equivalent of a Bette Davis romance, but it’s carried off with sufficient grace to make it a better class of high-gloss heart-tugger.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas and on Amazon Prime Video now