May December (2023)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.
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It is during this overture with the monarch resting on select plants that the dramatic theme music from Marcelo Zarvos (who basically repurposed Michel Legrand's theme for 1971's The Go-Between) plays into the concept of melodrama, and how our society feeds off it—especially when it's prepackaged in such a way as this.
The feeling of suspense is goosed by the prickling score, which Haynes borrows from another movie altogether – Michel Legrand’s theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film, The Go-Between. The two films hinge on furtive affairs, but more significantly, both films are about a person too unformed to understand how they are being manipulated. In May December that person is Joe, Gracie’s husband, played as an adult by Charles Melton (a former CW heartthrob, he was Reggie on Riverdale).
By adapting Michel Legrand's music for Joseph Losey's “The Go-Between,” Marcelo Zarvos' score emphasizes the roots of the film in the classical melodramas to which the writer-director paid homage in his remarkable “Far From Heaven” back in 2002.
Instead of writing a totally original score, Haynes––in a brilliant artistic recycling on par with R.M.N.'s re-use of In the Mood for Love‘s theme at Cannes last year––asked composer Marcelo Zavros to adapt one of his favorite scores: Michel Legrand's compositions for 1971's The Go-Between.
Close-up images of Monarch butterflies and their surrounding manicured flower gardens are scored by the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The archly dramatic music lends a discomfiting feeling to the scenes of domesticity (a cookout for friends and family in Savannah, Georgia) that soon follow. Such a jarring juxtaposition, best encapsulated by said music leading into a character complaining about not having enough hot dogs, sets up a film that wants to suture the lurid and the mundane, creating in the process a masterful meditation on performance and predation.
Haynes—aided by a discordant score from Marcelo Zarvos, who adapted Michel Legrand's work from the 1971 film The Go-Between—trains the camera on the details that show the ripple effects of Gracie's abuse.
Elsewhere his references skew higher-brow: When he positions Moore and Portman side-by-side in closeup, he evokes the dreamy surrealism of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, as if to suggest that Gracie's and Elizabeth's identities are blurring together.
With Carol and Far from Heaven, the director nodded to the mid-century melodramas of Douglas Sirk, but May December somehow owes more to both the Lifetime variety of the genre and Ingmar Bergman works like Persona. With that dichotomy, May December possesses an eely quality; it slides between comedy and drama, from entertaining to unnerving.
But both leads do transfixing work with characters who constantly reveal different sides of themselves, which is fitting given that one of Haynes’ acknowledged inspirations was Bergman’s Persona.
Much of the pleasure of the film lies in its clash of styles. At certain moments, it is trashy and voyeuristic. At others, for example when Elizabeth and Gracie are alone together, it becomes closer to Bergman’s Persona, with its famous shot in which the faces of the actor played by Liv Ullmann and her nurse Bibi Andersson seem to merge.
May December is Haynes's entry in the “women swapping identities” subgenre (alongside Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Robert Altman's 3 Women, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and so on), but it's a fully original one, with its own perspective on the ever-shifting power dynamics at its core.
Reuniting for a fifth time with Julianne Moore, their latest collaboration is heavy on Bergman’s Persona (1966) motifs as well in this hothouse of blurred lines set in one strangely steamy Savannah summer in 2015.
Elsewhere his references skew higher-brow: When he positions Moore and Portman side-by-side in closeup, he evokes the dreamy surrealism of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, as if to suggest that Gracie's and Elizabeth's identities are blurring together.
May December is Haynes's entry in the “women swapping identities” subgenre (alongside Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Robert Altman's 3 Women, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and so on), but it's a fully original one, with its own perspective on the ever-shifting power dynamics at its core.
May December is, in other words, in and of itself a very human and complex story — it is also a dark, comic melodrama about sociopathy and pedophilia, a little reminiscent of the tonal high-wire act performed by Paul Verhoeven in his 2016 rape comedy Elle.
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Take 2002’s Far From Heaven, for example. In many ways, the film, which centers on a 1950s suburban housewife whose secret affair threatens the sanguine domestic lifestyle she is expected to uphold, is a straight-up remake of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows, complete with all the soap and glitziness that defined Hays Code-era Hollywood.
May December is Haynes's entry in the “women swapping identities” subgenre (alongside Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Robert Altman's 3 Women, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and so on), but it's a fully original one, with its own perspective on the ever-shifting power dynamics at its core.
This is clearly done for parodic reasons as Haynes, no stranger to over-the-top and borderline surreal melodrama with films like Safe and I’m Not There under his belt, emphasises the heightened nature of writer Samy Burch’s narrative, which is often played straight in those sensationalised dramas on that particular channel, but here is done with a somewhat self-aware attitude.
Moore, who gave two of her greatest performances in Haynes' earlier dramas Safe and Far From Heaven, plays Gracie with an edge of steel and a childlike lisp inspired by Letourneau herself.
Haynes has already exhibited his flair for Douglas Sirk-style melodramas with Carol and Far From Heaven. Here, he keeps the structure but strips out the sumptuous colour and heady atmosphere found in his back catalogue, hewing to the antiseptic vibe of his 1995 hit Safe.
As he did in Safe, Haynes carefully constructs a cinematic world in May December where the environment reflects (and perhaps inspires) the characters' feelings.
Haynes, working with Moore for a fifth time (after "Safe," "Far From Heaven," "I'm Not There" and "Wonderstruck"), sets a soap opera tone early on, with an overly dramatic score built from pounding piano notes and camera movements exaggerated for effect.
It is amid this backdrop that a TV actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman, channeling her Black Swan character in search of perfection vibe) shows up to their seemingly “idyllic” world.
All the clichés of what the critic Miriam Bale once called the “persona swap movie” are as identifiable in its staging — the aforementioned mirror shots, the copy-and-paste mannerisms, the villainous seductions — as they were in, say, 2010’s Black Swan, in which Portman also starred.
Portman's fans may see Elizabeth as an unofficial reprise of her role as an obsessive performer in “Black Swan” (2010), but instead of a person sacrificing herself, including her sanity, for her craft, Elizabeth is making deliberate choices and could never plead insanity.
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May December isn't on the acerbic level of Todd Solondz's Happiness, which it thematically resembles.
Haynes – best known for films such as Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015) – comes at his material with an intensity that rekindles memories of some of Ingmar Bergman’s most fraught and closely focused character studies.
Haynes used similar effects in his Sirkean tribute “Far from Heaven,” but there, the soundstage aesthetics reflected the characters' passions and repressions.
The glorious Douglas Sirkian extravaganza Far from Heaven, a respectful but fully alive reading of Mildred Pierce, a documentary about the Velvet Underground that covers not just the band’s history but a broad swath of the cultural history around it: if you’re a certain kind of person, the more Haynes you get, the more you want.
But the impact is dulled a little bit by how salacious the rest of the film is. Haynes pulled this off in his period pieces (Far from Heaven and Carol), but doesn't quite get there in this film.
“Far from Heaven” (2002) fans who adore the collaboration between Julianne Moore and director Todd Haynes will be eager for a reunion over another period film.
Moore, who worked with Haynes in Safe and Far from Heaven, dials back her inherent sympathy to play Gracie as a blandly amiable woman who nurses her insecurities and then projects them onto others.