Three Women and One Summer That Changed Everything
Back in 2018, MILF was expected to be just another summer chick flick. However, it was much more than that as it tackled the complexities of aging and the intricacies of middle-aged friendships in addition to the much-needed comic relief. The feature film is set in the sunny French countryside and revolves around three friends, Sonia (Virginine Ledoyen), Cécile (Axelle Laffont), and Elise (Marie-Josée Croze), who travel to the French coastline to sell a house. Rather than enjoying the peaceful retreat they were hoping for, they ignite a flurry of amorous relationships with much younger men, inciting hilarity and self-reflection in equal parts.
The film does delve deeply into the fantasy of “cougars on holiday,” however it does so much more, as it opens the conversations to society’s increasingly sidelined portrayal of women during this period of life.
Sonia played by Virginine Ledoyen is the most iconic character in the film. Sonia in the MILF character is burdened by loss as she just lost her husband, and enters the vacation in a much needed retreat. However her expectations of the trip are completely distorted.
Currently called Sonia, the character Ledoyen performed was built with Sonia’s character essence but also included Ledoyen’s personal story and confrontations. Sonia’s character was personally and socially complex, and considering the social climate where women’s age and sexuality was shunned, Ledoyen was perhaps facing the same struggles, as it appeared in the interviews with her. “Desire in the age of Sonia,” is something akin to what Sonia is about. This was based on the personal exemplars and ecounters Sonia was bound to.
Ledoyen also spoke about Sonia’s character and the freedom she felt after her husband passes away. She was no longer identified only as ‘the grieving widow.’ This especially resonated with almost every woman in the audience, particularly those over thirty. Apart from the performing arts, ledoyen has never been the face of a ‘silly married woman struggling to date.’
Axelle Laffont seems to wear several hats at once in her self portrayal.
Laffont is both the star and the director of the film and that is the magic of her creativity. Sonia and Cecile are both integral to the film. Sonia provides the warmth in the film while Cecilia is the driving force of the film. She is the one who is always ready to take the plunge and jump into the depths of romance. While doing so, Cecile manages to turn a normal and a boring summer into something that is so wild and scandalous one could only imagine.
Cecile is more or less lifelike. Talking to Laffont, one swiftly realizes that putting together MILF was in so many ways about self reflection. It reveals the ponderous journey of a wife and a mother in her 40s dealing with romance, the effects of aging, and the many labels that society places in her. It is also about her growing struggle with identity. By integrating her own self into her films, Laffont enhances the blurring of the distinction of the character with the creator. It is in stealth which is so characteristic of her that allows her to shine the most while also being the most self deprecating. It is what allows her to embrace Cecile and contrast her with the Sonia, the more gloomy part of the film and the hesitant character played by Elise.
Laffont abstains from defining the role of Cecile in the film. She prefers to refer to it as the most challenging role in the film. There is emotional and mental trauma to it and she believes it is important to portray it with some level of finesse. It is about determination. In her willingness to dish out unfiltered and brutal honesty, one could lose the tenderness and the core of the emotions within in. The audience is rewarded with a character that resonates so strongly with the audience, a trait hard to come by in the filmmaking world.
Elise: The reluctant adventurer
Marie-Josée Croze, who starred in The Barbarian Invasions and Munich, plays Elise, the most reserved of the trio, and the one who Croze portrays is most reluctant to have any of the fun. In what is, in effect, the spectator’s role, she hesitates, if only for a moment, to grapple with the moral rationalizations and the social anxieties surrounding the phenomenon of older women courting younger men.
In what is her real life, Croze has often been cast in roles as emotionally complex and conflicted women and here she has let stand up the comic premise to the heavy lifting of emotional truth. In interviews, she has said preparing for the role of Elise to her meant acquiring a particular brand of humor — the self-conscious sort — in which one plays embarrassment in a way that one does not ridicule the character. This way of thinking is what to cultivate is counterbalancing the dynamics of the trio.
When fiction mirrors cultural truths
The characters in MILF, alongside the real life experiences that epitomized a culture, is what gave the film its cultural impact. The word MILF is inherently a pejorative–the term objectifying and fantasizing women for the male gaze. This film recovers it as a way of asserting ownership of desire. French viewers observed the film’s humor, sex, and middle aged female characters and the unapologetic way women portrayed the characters of “mistakes”.
In India, MPAA traces more clichéd representations of older Women. The film proved popular to those wanting less exiled portrayals of women. The way Sonia, Cécile, and Elise chase their happiness, and do so with so much dignity, even though there was a great possibility of being ridiculed, suggests a desire to comment about the state of world with respect to women’s age, love in their lives, and their realities.
Set with giggles and spontaneous creations for the whole night, MILF was, like the film, equally vivacious. Axelle Laffont gave the space for improvisation to happen freely, which enabled the women and younger men to, more than once, come up with their most hilarious interactions, not from the script but from simply letting go during the rehearsals and the takes.
Many people cite the fact that the most delightful place to do filming is the sunny south of France. Ledoyen was no exception, however, she did comment on the discomfort that prolonged filming outdoors, in that location, under the Mediterranean, proved to be. Set’s sense of esprit, mic of the three women, which is most central in the story, and most creative, gave the feeling of camaraderie that the film’s warmth and the location suggested.
Another interesting aspect of the film is that the younger male actors frequently claimed that they felt subdued relative to the older cast members. The younger male actors, while charming and physical, were none the less outshone by the primary focus of the film and of the older women who were the story and the tone.
The Echoes After Release
After MILF became available for streaming, it rapidly transformed into the centerpiece of countless conversations. It is arguable that audiences appreciated the film for its ability to evoke strong emotion, juxtaposed with the criticism that it is oversimplified. It is of, primary importance, however, to analyze how women, younger girls in particular, spoke of the film, and how that testimony in turn impacted the way they perceived older women. There was a similar male testimony, in which they expressed profound discomfort, suggesting that the concept of MILF was far too casual.
In a nutshell, Virginie Ledoyen was able to wrap dramatic depth in the gentleness of a comedy, which the audience had long forgotten. On the other hand, for Laffont, it positioned her in the light of a fearless woman addresssing sensitive issues in her dualistic roles of the director and performer. Croze had in his possession yet another performance which he was able to balance the fabrications of comedy with the fabrications of truth.
Although allegedly remembering MILF as a “saucy summer comedy” is deserved, as mentioned earlier, its characters, and particularly Sonia, have traces of life that transcend the screen. MILF served as a canvas that was painted over with the actors’ realities, realities they were willing to bare beneath the gleaming Mediterranean sky.
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