Camila Mendes: What We Can Take Away From Her Latest Roles in ‘Uploaded’ And ‘Música’ On Strong Women Being In Romantic Relationships With Weak Men

Writing about ‘It Ends With Us’ for my 3 previous posts reminded me of two movies I recently watched. They have one thing in common, and it’s that they both starred Camila Mendes, who also starred in the teen series, ‘Riverdale’, as well as the Netflix original film, ‘Do Revenge’. And these movies I was reminded of were ‘Uploaded’ and ‘Música’. Both are available to stream on Amazon Prime. No, neither of these movies represented abusive relationships like ‘It Ends With Us’ did, but they represented relationships nonetheless.

‘Uploaded’ is a 2024 film, which co-stars Archie Renaux and Marisa Tomei. It follows a young woman named Ana, who’s an aspiring art consultant working as an intern. Though she works for a glamorous company, her life usually anything but that. She lives with her sister and her boyfriend because she can’t afford to live on her own. One day, Ana corrects a crucial error, and as a reward, her boss, Claire, played by Tomei, invites her on a work trip to London as an assistant’s assistant.

Claire’s two assistants, Suzette and Renee, attempt to sabotage Ana’s trip, but it turns into Ana’s favour as she ends up being upgraded to first-class tickets to London. While she waits at the airport, she meets a wealthy man named William, played by Renaux. William assumes Ana is an art director of the company she works for, and instead of correcting him and telling him who she really is, Ana goes with it and pretends to have Claire’s job.

William is impressed by Ana’s charm, so he introduces her to his mother, Catherine, who’s a well-known British celebrity. Ana continues to play her role as living the life of her boss, and she certainly gets perks for being so likeable, which isn’t something that could really be said about Claire. She’s not likeable, and isn’t necessarily someone that Catherine would work with just by meeting her. If I were to compare, Claire is another version of Miranda from 2006’s ‘Devil Wears Prada’, played by Meryl Streep. And just as an FYI, the movie’s officially getting a sequel, with the main cast to be returning.

Ana’s lies get caught up, and William and Catherine find out who she REALLY is. William is, of course, angered and feels betrayed by her web of lies. With that said, he ends their romantic relationship. Catherine, on the other hand, isn’t bothered by it and still wants to work with her. In fact, when she meets with Claire to discuss a potential collaboration between the two, she sets a condition that they will only collaborate if Ana will be working with her.

The movie time jumps to 6 months later. Ana is now the proud owner of her own art gallery in New York. William is nowhere to be found. But of course, just because it’s Hollywood, William comes to the gallery at the very end, when Ana least expects it, and the two make up and kiss. I was utterly disappointed by the ending of the movie. The movie itself was good, but the ending was disappointing. In my honest opinion, it should’ve ended with Ana opening her gallery in New York and starting a new life; the life she always wanted and worked hard for without the presence of a man. Let’s face it, it’s fairly unrealistic that she’d even be thinking about William – someone she had a brief connection with 6 months ago. Life doesn’t work the way the movie portrayed it out to be. In reality, life just goes on.

Mendes’ second released movie this year, ‘Música, which also starred Rudy Mancuso and co-starred Francesca Reale, portrayed exactly what I was looking for in ‘Uploaded’. ‘Música’, unlike ‘Uploaded’, has a a sort of realism, and yet, hopefulness brought to it at the very end of the movie as the credits started to roll. And just as a fun fact, ‘Música’ was written and directed by its star, Rudy Mancuso, and he based the storyline of the movie on his own personal experience. He and Mendes are also a couple in real-life. They’ve been in a relationship since July 2022.

‘Música’ centres around Rudy, a young man who’s struggling with the effects of synesthesia. The movie opens with Rudy sitting at a diner table with his girlfriend, Haley, played by Reale. Haley is breaking up with Rudy, but Rudy is too distracted by all the noise to even care much. Every day sounds and noises is a reflection of a newfound symphony for him. He struggles to navigate his life and balance his artistic ambitions. He wants to get into puppetry and music, much to the dismay of his mother, Maria, played by Rudy Mancuso’s real-life mother, Maria Mancuso.

Rudy seems to be doing just fine after his breakup with Haley. I’d say it was probably the best thing for him. During this time, he meets and gets close with Isabella, played by Mendes. Isabella works as a waitress at the diner Rudy is a regular customer at. It was also the diner where Haley broke up with him. He starts courting her, and the two eventually decide to date. Rudy’s life was finally on track. He knew what he wanted to do. He knew where he was headed. And he finally had a woman he actually cared about to help him through his journey.

But, of course, because it’s a movie after all, something had to go wrong. Haley regretted breaking up with Rudy, mostly because of how happy he seemed to be following his break up with her. She wanted to be a part of that happiness. She couldn’t handle seeing Rudy so happy without her. With that, Rudy’s relationship with Isabella became threatened. When she found out that he did, in fact, meet with his ex-girlfriend, Isabella breaks up with Rudy. He begs her to change her mind, but to no avail. She said it was too late; that they weren’t ready to be in a relationship because they couldn’t get what each of them needed to get separately. They couldn’t be in a relationship if they couldn’t figure themselves out in the first place.

Unlike his breakup with Haley, Rudy actually cared about Isabella, and he was heartbroken by the end of their relationship. Nevertheless, life went on despite Isabella’s absence. He made his vision a reality. The end of the movie saw him lead a full-house performance. There was no sight of Isabella anywhere. It’s only in the last few seconds of the movie that Rudy opens a letter presumably from Isabella, giving some hope of a reconciliation between the two, but still leaving it open-ended. It could also mean that she reached out to him as a friend.

What does it all mean???

You’re probably wondering why I did an entire ramble about Camila Mendes’ most recent movie roles, and rightfully so. You see, these two movies made me think about how love and partnership are represented in movies as a whole, and whether or not it’s a realistic representation to begin with. I wouldn’t call ‘It Ends With Us’ a romance movie, no matter what Blake Lively says or how she tries to promote the film. Instead, it’s a movie portraying the realism of domestic violence.

And since we’ve mentioned ‘The Devil Wears Pravda’ in this particular blog post, it also has a sense of realism to it when it comes to showcasing love and romance. The movie showcases its main character, Andy, played by Anne Hathaway, being in a longterm relationship with Nate. They live a fairly comfortable life; they live together in a small apartment they can barely afford and hang out with their core small group of friends. They’re comfortable with each other and are fine just the way they are.

As time goes on, Andy spends more and more time in her work at Runway busting her a** off trying to impress her boss, Miranda, so she could get ahead in her career. She adapts to that world. She changes her appearance completely; her clothing, hair, make up, and even her personal. Nate doesn’t like this new version of her. Her friends aren’t thrilled either. It’s evident that Nate doesn’t want her to change. He doesn’t want her to thrive and succeed. He’s the one that’s holding her back. Miranda might’ve been hard on Andy, but Nate is the real villain in Andy’s story.

Thankfully, Andy and Nate break up before Andy leaves for Paris for work purposes. Once she’s back in New York and is looking for a new job, she meets with Nate at a restaurant and apologizes. She said she turned against her friends and everything she believed in, and in her words, ‘for what?’ Nate responds that she did so for clothes and shoes. Literally, I could do was ask, ‘What The Actual F*ck?!’ Do you not want to see your girlfriend to succeed? Do you not want your girlfriend to get ahead in her career. She didn’t work for the clothes and the shoes. She worked to prove to her boss that she’s a f*cking bada** and is good at her job.

The scene where they met following their break up implied that there was hope for a reconciliation. I very much hoped that they’d stay broken up. Luckily, screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna agrees with me, as she told Variety in 2023. In fact, the sequel to the book, ‘Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns’, sees Andy Nate-less, and instead, is married to a nepo baby named Max. Anne Hathaway has previously said she didn’t believe Nate was unsupportive of Andy, though Adrian Grenier, who played Nate in the 2006 film actually agreed with my theory.

When appearing on ‘Watch What Happens Live’ Hathaway told Andy Cohen, ‘I think that they were both very young and figuring things out. He did behave like a brat, but I also behaved like a brat in my 20s and I hopefully grew out of it. I think that that’s what we all do, and I wouldn’t want to be defined by my worst moment in my 20s, certainly. So, I don’t hold Nate as a villain, actually.’

Grainer called Nate selfish and unsupportive. Brosh McKenna, on the other hand, told Entertainment Tonight in 2021,’He’s saying [Andy is] following the devil down the wrong path. And that’s his role, which is often a role played by women, which is to remind the character of their moral intentions. I think he isn’t unsupportive of her work; he’s happy for her, at the end. I don’t think it’s like he doesn’t want her to work.’ In 2019, she told Teen Vogue, ‘She’s being a hypocrite, and he’s right at the end. She goes to apologize to him because he was right. She was selling herself out and going down the wrong path. I think it’s interesting now that we’re so encouraging people to like, ‘Get what’s yours,’ that we don’t see that she’s Charlie Sheen in Wall Street.’

Personally, I don’t think Andy owed Nate an apology for anything in particular. She did what she had to do. If she’d listened to him, she would’ve been stuck in one place. She deserved much more than that. I don’t think Nate was a bad person, but I do think Andy was just not the right one for him. It’s not necessarily about them making mistakes in their 20’s, but rather it’s about who Nate is as a person. He didn’t seem like someone who’s adaptable to change. Therefore, I think he stayed the same in his 30’s and 40’s.

Make no mistake…

Women are made out to believe that they need men to be fulfilled. Some women believe that being in a relationship is more important than having a career. Some women even give up their careers for their partners. I know a woman who did so because she thought it’d save her marriage, which didn’t end up happening as the two broke up anyways, and I know a woman who WOULD give up working if she had a husband as she believes that men are meant to be the breadwinners while women stayed home.

What it means to have it all for one woman might not be the same for another. I personally wouldn’t be fulfilled by staying home and taking care of my child. But I have female friends that ARE, and I totally respect it. One of my friends even plans to homeschool her daughter full-time when she gets to that age. I also have female friends who are career-oriented and hadn’t gotten their sh*t together when it comes to their personal lives.

It might not have been by choice. One female friend of mine is living single, but not by choice. She just can’t seem to find a partner that’s right for her. She’s in her mid-thirties, has a career that she absolutely loves, but is struggling to find ‘the one’. I’m someone who firmly believes that it’s better to be single than to end up with the wrong person. Choosing a life-partner is the hardest thing a woman can ever do. With that said, I personally think she’s thriving, even though she herself doesn’t think so. Maybe I’m just saying this because I myself have chosen the right life partner and father to my child.

And then there are women who NEED to be single in order to better themselves. Katy Perry was one of them. She’s now in a domestic partnership with Orlando Bloom, and together they have a daughter, Daisy Dove, born in August 2020. But things weren’t always smooth sailing for the couple. The two were broken up for a time during their courtship. When she appeared on Alex Cooper’s ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast on September 4th, Perry opened up about their break up and said, ‘We weren’t really in it from day one. He was because he had just done a huge time of celibacy and he had set intentions. I was fresh out of a relationship, and I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I need to swim in a different pond, but I had to do a lot real work.’

The singer went through a rough period in her life in 2018, and according to her, that was the real test in her relationship with Bloom. She said, ‘I showed him the worst of me. I was like, ‘Here’s the next test. I’m gonna show you the craziest b–ch you’ve ever seen,’ and he was like, ‘I’m not shook.’ And I was like, ‘You’re my baby daddy.’ If you’re not shook by this, then we’re going the distance. We want to evolve that’s I think why we’re in our relationship is to become better humans so we can raise this beautiful human being. It’s been different layers. The more we do the work, the more we find the next level. And sometimes we get stuck, and we’re like, ‘OK, let’s go in to do the work and this is going to be annoying, and I don’t want to do it. We don’t have the time. I’m tired.’ But we’re gonna do it. And we find the next level. That’s why we’re continuing in the relationship.’

Not to be confused…

Let’s be clear, women don’t need men. On the contrary, women want men. Sometimes, women get lost in relationships. They believe that they need men, particularly the men they’re with, when in reality, they’re worth so much more than that. I’ve witnessed some strong women get lost in their relationships and become completely different people. I’ve witnessed women lose their hopes and dreams, and give up on their hopes and dreams, because the men they were with were holding them back. I’ve witnessed women allow the men they were with disrespect and abuse them because they didn’t see the signs, they thought it was a normal way to be treated and others are treated the same, and they didn’t see their own worth.

Life isn’t always black-and-white. It’s not like the movies where you meet a man you like, you get to know him, you date him, you break up, and then magically get back together. It doesn’t always work this way. In fact, it rarely works this way. Mostly, it’s because men are afraid of strong women. With that said, weak men aim to make ‘their’ women just as weak, if not more. A lot of the time, they’re successful at it. But other times, they’re not. Just look at Taylor Swift and her life.

Swift, who’s best friends with Blake Lively, the subject matter of the previous 3 posts on this blog and whose music is featured in ‘It Ends With Us’, Lively’s latest movie, is a mega-freaking-superstar. She started out in the business almost 20 years ago, and with each project she takes herself upon, she becomes more and more successful. And she’s very humble about it too. She never thinks her success could grow any further, but somehow, it does. And now, we can’t turn our faces anywhere without hearing about her.

For the most part, Swift’s subject matter in her songs have been boys and her relationships with them. She’s known to be a serial dater, though if she were a man, she’d never be labeled as such. In reality, she was a 20-something year old woman enjoying her dating life and never settling for less than she deserved. We should all thrive to be like her. Between 2016 and 2023, Swift was in a relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn. We were all rooting for them to end up together, but…sometimes, life just doesn’t work that way because it’s real life; not a rom-com movie.

As of 2023, Swift has been in a relationship with football player Travis Kelce. Just recently, he was asked what he thought of being his girlfriend’s ’arm candy. He told CBS Mornings, ‘It’s the life I chose, I guess. It comes with the territory of wanting to do fun activities like this and signing up for cool sponsorships like this (Kelce’s new Pepsi commercial) and endorsements.’

The real definition of a strong man….

Someone who’s not intimidated by his woman’s success. Someone who supports his woman’s success. Someone who encourages that success. I guess the ending for ‘Uploaded’ WOULD work in real life if William was actually THAT strong man, which I actually think he is. And I think he’s part of her success. He was the one that introduced Ana to his mother and everyone else in his circle. That’s not to say that he gets all the credit because Ana did all the rest of the work.

Success doesn’t come easy, whether you’re a man or a woman. Success isn’t something that’s achieved in solitude. Success is about being in the right place at the right time, and that Ana was when she met William at the airport. When it comes to their story, I’d like to think that William is a man who is Ana’s biggest cheerleader. She achieved her success and her goal of owning her own gallery in New York without having him by his side. And when both were ready to be in each other’s lives again and be a united front, they came back to each other; just like Katy Perry got back together with Orlando Bloom in the end.

We just have to remember that not everyone’s story is the same. Not every love story has a happy rom-com ending. Sometimes it’s just better to leave things behind in the past and move forward. But we also have to remind ourselves that men are always the problem. Women can be problematic too. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror and think, ‘How can I better myself today? How can I be the better version of myself today than I was yesterday? How can I improve? How can make the wrong right?’ Katy Perry did in her relationship with Orlando Bloom, and that’s why their relationship works.