Natalie Portman’s last project was a collaboration with Israeli-American director Alma Har’el — the trippy and profound period Apple TV+ show “Lady in the Lake,” in which she played a 1960s Baltimore Jewish housewife who decides to leave her husband and follow her own passions — both sexual and professional. For her next project, Portman will again be playing a woman at a crossroads in her life, in a film directed by another great Jewish director, “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, called “Good Sex.”
Portman, born Natalie Herschlag in Jerusalem, has long been of Dunham. In 2011, the “Black Swan” actress sang the praises of her debut film. “Did you see ‘Tiny Furniture?’ Lena Dunham wrote, directed, and starred in it; she’s 23, and it is just amazing,” she told Vogue. “She walks around in her underwear for the whole movie; it’s harsh. She’s the subject, she’s not the object, and it’s beautiful — that’s the kind of thing we need more of.”
Now, 13 years later (a whole b’nai mitzvah!), the two are finally working together. In “Good Sex,” Portman will play Ally, a New York therapist on the cusp of her 40th birthday who gets “pushed, kicking and screaming, by her best friend” into the “hopeless” local dating world. According to the film’s official synopsis, Ally soon finds herself torn between “a steamy fling with a 20-something Brooklyn hipster” which she falls into just after beginning a “promising, more conventional relationship with Alan, a successful 50-something in Manhattan.”
“As a romantic crossroads blossoms into a full-blown identity crisis, Ally juggles to keep these two very different men separate and to make sense of her own conflicting desires before she risks losing them both,” the synopsis reads.
The May-Decemeber romance has become an incredibly popular movie trope as of late, as have explorations of the sex lives of women in the 40s and 50s. Portman herself starred in the pretty dark “May Decemeber,” loosely inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal. Then there’s Nicole Kidman’s “Babygirl” and the newest installment of the “Bridget Jones” franchise; it is quite affirming and refreshing to see this trend of actresses in their 40s and 50s having fulfilling and freeing sex on screen. Likewise, in the literary world, books like Miranda July’s “All Fours” have also sparked many a conversation about female desire post-motherhood.
“Good Sex” will be Dunham’s fourth feature film, after the celebrated and somewhat autobiographical “Tiny Furniture,” the sex comedy “Sharp Stick” and her delightful 2022 adaptation of the Catherine Cushman novel “Catherine Called Birdy.” This year, Dunham will also be premiering her first TV show as a showrunner since “Girls” — “Too Much,” starring the hilarious Megan Stalter (“Hacks”) and Will Sharpe (“The White Lotus,” “A Real Pain”) in a romance very much based on her love story with husband Luis Felber. The show, in which Stalter plays Jessica, who escapes to England after a terrible breakup where she meets the British Felix (Sharpe), already has a pretty Jewish cast, including Emily Ratajkowski, Janicza Bravo, Leo Reich, Michael Zegen, Rhea Perlman and Stephen Fry, who acted alongside Dunham in the Holocaust dramedy “Treasure.”
” I have always played Jewish characters, because I’m a Jewish person,” Dunham, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home in New York, told Kveller in 2024. All the characters she’s written, she added, “came from Jewish families, which is what I relate to, and what I connect to.”
Dunham’s Good Things Going Productions posted about their excitement for the project, saying, “so thrilled to be able to work with our forever muse @natalieportman and the brilliant women of @mountaina on a movie that is all about finding love, lust, friendship and joy.”
While it’s not certain that Ally, Portman’s character, will be Jewish (though a therapist in New York played by Natalie Portman and written by Lena Dunham certainly holds some promise), we do agree with comedian Julie Klausner, who commented on the post stating that this project is a true example of “Jewish excellence.” Besides, some would say that good sex and sexual pleasure is in and of itself a Jewish value.
“Good Sex” is hopefully coming sometime in 2025, and we can’t wait to watch it.
