“My take on it, and Jennifer Westfeldt was on the project prior to me being there, was very much riffing off of Notting Hill,” Showalter explained to IndieWire. “The Hugh Grant character is an everyman, and so I needed Solène to be an everywoman. In the book, I didn’t feel like Solene is an everywoman.” He continued, “I wanted the audience to feel some sense of ‘I could be that person.’ I could bump into the biggest pop star in the world, and they could fall in love with me. That’s sort of the wish fulfillment adventure I think Notting Hill is, what is it that he says? ‘Of every bookstore or whatever in the city, she walks into mine.’”
Hayes and Izzy’s Ages
The sordid nature of the book’s logline, “What if your teenager’s fantasy was your reality?” gets sanitized a bit by changing the ages of both Hayes and Solène’s daughter, Izzy. In the film, they’ve been aged up from 20 and 12 to 24 and 16, respectively. “We wanted the audience to feel good about them, to feel good about their love affair and to root for them,” Showalter told IndieWire. Making Izzy older, and firmly of the opinion that August Moon is “so seventh grade,” also allows the character to be more of a sounding board for her mother: “Mom, why would you break up with a talented, kind feminist?”
To further cushion any blowback, the film makes clear that Izzy’s favorite August Moon member was “always Rory,” and never Hayes, as it was in the book. “There was this element of you’re cheating, you’re betraying your best friend essentially, you’re betraying your closest loved one by having an affair with the one I love,” Showalter told IndieWire of the switch. “It added a layer of scandal to it that is really intriguing and interesting. But felt like for what we were trying to do, it makes it a little harder to root for Solène and Hayes.”
The Amount of Sex
“The movie is not a sex-fest, but, much like the new film Challengers, it runs on the energy of implied sex, of passion guiding people to deeper experience,” Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson writes in his review of the film. True to that assessment, there are far fewer steamy scenes on screen than in the pages of Lee’s book—and what does appear in the film is far less explicit. Gone is Solène’s thrilling discovery that Hayes is far more orally passionate than her ex-husband, or an X-rated scene where the couple has sex for the first time sans condom on her dining room table. In their place, we get rather stimulating montages of the pair’s lovemaking, as well as a particularly spirited post-coital sequence involving room service chicken fingers and Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days.”
The Ending
One of the most contentious aspects of the book remains its unhappy ending. Torn apart by a barrage of negative press, Solène breaks up with Hayes out of concern for her daughter’s wellbeing but suggests an arrangement akin to Carrie and Aidan’s five-year sabbatical on And Just Like That. In the book, though, the breakup becomes permanent. “He called me. In the beginning, every day. Multiple times. Although I would not answer. And he texted. At first often, and then every few days or so. It went on for months,” Solène says of Hayes. “These little messages that would paralyze me. And to which I resisted responding. Because I had made a choice. I miss you. I’m thinking of you. I still love you. And then one day, they stopped. Long, long before I had stopped loving him.”
But the film offers a far sunnier outcome. It ends by cutting to five years after the split, where our star-crossed lovers eventually reunite at her gallery. We don’t see them get back together, but the prospect of reconciliation is very much alive. “We felt like a more uplifting ending was what would be most satisfying for our audience,” Showalter told RadioTimes.com. “And ultimately, the audience is what matters most when making a movie like this.”
Even Lee has entertained the possibility of a more optimistic addendum. “Pretty much right after I finished writing [The Idea of You], I started writing notes for what could possibly be a sequel, mostly because I couldn’t get them out of my head,” she told Vogue. “Every once in a while, I’ll feel it really strongly, and I’ll sit down and I’ll write a scene or two, and I have a file that’s getting longer and longer,” she added. “I didn’t kill them off for a reason.”