On Thursday, May 2nd all of the stars aligned.
(1) I didn’t have evening plans — I was staying in an old mill-turned-hotel in The Cotswolds, where my room, part of what ostensibly used to be the stables, opened directly onto a lush, green lawn, kept perfectly ripe, if not mildly boggy, in the Spring rain. I had been out and about for the day, walking part of the Cotswolds Way, the haze off the fields backlit by the bright sun in a come-for-me-Matthew-Macfadyen kind of way. I came back to the hotel mid-afternoon satisfied, albeit cold, my clothes covered in mud. I took to the roll-top bathtub for a warm-up. I walked the gravel path around the side of the estate to the pub, where the bartender Alejandro, only three nights into our acquaintance, knew I liked my wine large, my fries covered in truffle and parmesan and my bill sent directly to my room. I was on vacation.
(2) I didn’t have plans the next day — I had stacked all of my work meetings up early in the week and, over Steak Frites and a glass of Shiraz in a corner booth of the pub, finished up the last of my deliverables. I was free for the weekend.
(3) A new rom-com was set to release at 8AM BST the next day, and the book that the film was based on was available on Kindle Unlimited.
Suffice it to say, such an alignment meant that I was about to relive the most glorious rebellion of my youth — pulling an all-nighter reading.
The concept gave me a rush and I left the pub with a glass of Shiraz in each hand, cheeky side-eye from Alejandro copped. While I was out, housekeeping had left a couple of homemade cookies in my room, “fresh from the chef” stamped on the paper wrapping. It was as if I had glimpsed the perfect life — long secluded walks in the morning, sudsy bubble baths in the afternoon, a hearty meal, a friendly bartender, and a duvet-decked pillow-top bed to fall into at night, all rounded out with a book.
I was feeling blissful. It might have been the wine.
I had had my eyes on The Idea of You since seeing promo for the film earlier this year. It tells the story of a love affair between a 40-year-old mom (Anne Hathaway) and a member of a boy band (Nicholas Galitzine) twenty years her junior, perfectly aligning with two of my dear loves — Anne Hathaway, whose Mia Thermopolis resonated so intensely with me as a kid, in part because she was awkward but mostly because she was brunette, and One Direction, whom I saw two nights in a row at Ford Field when I was in college as well as every night on youtube between 2011 and 2015. The miraculously scandal-free Nicholas Galitzine was the cherry on top; marathoning his recent filmography, from Cinderella to Purple Hearts to Bottoms to Red, White and Royal Blue and finally Mary & George, would result in nothing less than cinematic whiplash seeing as the man can play literally any main character as long as they are conventionally good looking.
Coming out of the book around 5AM,
the early morning sun seeping around the black-out curtains, the cold, wet air from the rainy night having kept the room fresh, birdsong as the backing track, I was impressed by what I’d read. Rarely one for commercial fiction, I suspected the book wouldn’t be my favorite, but was ultimately taken with its conversation of a very specific topic: the role of boy bands in girls’ coming-of-age. In the book, the main character Solène’s daughter, 12-year-old Isabelle, is obsessed with August Moon — a boy band masterminded and led by Solène’s lover, Hayes. From the moment Hayes and the rest of the band enter the narrative, it’s charming how seriously they take this responsibility, always doting and never dismissive. I, with limited exposure to 12-year-olds, am not sure I’d be up to the task.
It reminds me a lot of a moment from Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry — when she’s sat with a group of children who are given the opportunity to ask her a question. One of the girls asks if she can have a hug. Michelle obliges. Next thing she knows, everyone in the room wants a hug. She recognizes that, for a child, a hug will stick with them longer than any question she answers. Harry and Meghan said something similar in their documentary — that each time a fan asks for a picture or an autograph you have to oblige — from the fan’s perspective, it’s their one shot to meet the often enigmatic celebrity. It’s an interesting idea about the responsibility of celebrity that I often mull over. It’s an idea of celebrity that I like to imagine the teenaged members of One Direction, my own 90s baby built-in benchmark for boy band, tried to embody on their slingshot to the top, though I couldn’t tell you for certain.
And when I made it around to the film, approximately 2.5 minutes after it launched, my phone’s car-horn alarm blaring through the suite as I lulled in and out of a short REM cycle, I was immediately taken by Anne Hathaway’s performance. Within the first fifteen minutes, the camera sweeps the Coachella main stage crowd, where she puts that Les Miserables Oscar to work with blushed cheeks, a grin creeping slowly, surely towards her ears in an attempt to “play it cool” as the boy band half her age cues up to play.
I remember laying in bed more than a decade ago, late at night swearing to do the same; wondering what exactly I could write on Twitter to catch Niall’s attention — and then panicking because if Niall noticed me, then I could never have Harry. I had only one chance. I would have to choose which to message. It was a crippling (and decidedly uncool) pressure that (thank god) kept me out of everyone’s DMs.
And while I’ve never met the men of One Direction, not even back when they were boys, unwittingly slung into the dreams of every girl born between 1992 and 2000, I maintain the idea that the girls who did meet them had every innocent fantasy satisfied — an idea that is rekindled with the premiere of The Idea of You.
And while the high-budget film, complete with its dreamy Hollywood Hills cottage and intimate “Essex Hotel” suite, did exactly what I wanted it to — entertain — it fell flat in one key area — the music. It was a part I was particularly excited about, seeing as the writer of the songs for the film, Savan Kotecha, wrote One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful as well as other classics including Britney’s If U Seek Amy. Alas, when the musical scenes came around I felt like a bystander — an observer on scientific exploration, more interested in how the songs contribute to the plot than in understanding the appeal of the band from Anne Hathaway’s character’s perspective or giving credibility to the claim that these boys are so famous that they can’t go anywhere without being stalked. It was a stark contrast to some of Nicholas Galitzine’s other work — the viewer standing on the Hollywood Bowl’s stage alongside his love interest’s band in Purple Hearts or marching through the palace as he bemoans his romantic fate in Cinderella, not to mention of course the bloodcurdling performance that cemented Anne Hathaway’s Oscar.
But more than anything else in the musical scenes, it became obvious to me that they did not have a boy band fanatic on their consulting team given the fact that the band did not wear in-ear monitors — one of the hottest boy band accessories.
Because, while I internalized the compliments given in Little Things and imagined being the girl who is “taken home” in Story of My Life, fifteen-year-old me would assure you that I was no idiot. I knew it was all an act — the clothes, the songs, even the anecdotes that the guys told in interviews. Nevertheless, I sought out signs of life in the show — moments that were so steeped in spontaneity that there’s no chance they could have been scripted. Mostly, I looked to the in-ear monitors.
Because if Harry Styles had both of his in-ear monitors in, it was only because he was taking his job very seriously — focusing on his art, passionate about his songs, and getting lost in them. And if Louis Tomlinson had taken one out, it was because he wanted to connect, to live in the moment so to speak, hearing direct feedback from fans and being able to react to it in real time. And if Zayn Malik took both of his out, it was only because he felt that he could trust the rest of the band implicitly to carry the rest of the song without him, allowing him his moment of respite in a long show, signaling to the crowd that that moment was not about him, but about his brothers-in-song.
Without in-ear monitors, August Moon, the boy band of the film, lacked the key indicator of both their station in the industry — small-gig, small-time artists of course performing naked-eared — as well as a powerful prop in conveying their own characters’ experience on stage. While everyone and their mother has thrown a party, in-ear monitors are the enigmatic addition to a concert that any ol’ Joe doesn’t understand — the exclusivity of which adds a level of credibility (and, for an ambitious sort like myself, a hotness) to their users. For me, the absence was deafening (LOL) particularly since the gift of earplugs from Hayes to Solène was an inside joke between the two of them in the book — the gift in the movie then coming up flat, as Hayes runs onstage lacking the ear protection that he had just gifted his lover.
In any case, bliss to me at 29 may be a field-side studio, a wine-induced, novel facilitated all-nighter and a short drive leading to a long walk through the South Wales’ countryside, but bliss to me a half life ago was the idea of a hand combed through Harry Styles’ hair, a serenade of Liam Payne’s voice with Niall Horan’s guitar strum. It was the friendship of Louis Tomlinson and the whispered confidences of the ever enigmatic Zayn Malik. It was the idea of you, One Direction, that brought a teenaged me bliss. And it was The Idea of You that reminded me of that youthful longing.
Check out Suzy and my’s episode of Tea Behind the Tunes on Harry Styles’ Fine Line
In case someone here has been living under a rock, the original film about boy bands is a “can’t miss” — That Thing You Do! can be streamed on Hulu
Relive my own teenaged One Direction obsession with this curated playlist of the One Direction songs that changed my life