Nobody reinvents the old-school melodrama like Todd Haynes. His films are full-throated, vivid, and sympathetic depictions of trapped housewives and desperate women of the past – think of the yearning lesbian love story of Carol, and a white woman’s forbidden lust in Far from Heaven.
But his latest film, May December, flips that theme on its head. It is a campy, theatrical story of sexual predation and female manipulation that remains thought-provoking even with its tongue in its cheek.
Its story is a fictionalisation of real events: a sensational case from 1996 in which a thirty-something woman, Mary Kay Letourneau, began to sexually abuse a sixth-grader. She got pregnant when he was 15, served prison time for statutory rape, and remarried the boy when she was released. Both of them still insisted it was totally consensual. In May December, those roles are played by the great Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore – here called Gracie – and relative newcomer Charles Melton, both of whom are on peak form.
We meet this couple living in bourgeois “happiness” in a large house with their own teen children, the drama of the past seemingly far behind them. Then an actress, Elizabeth – played with sly, cloying charm by Natalie Portman – visits them in order to play Gracie in a film, and Haynes uses her to take a scalpel to the real power dynamics in this too-strange-to-be-true situation.
Regarded with thinly veiled catty suspicion by Gracie, Elizabeth ingratiates herself as best she can with the couple and their family and friends, interviewing them for the darkest and seediest parts of the past and soaking up the gossip like a sponge. The passive-aggressive relationship between the women, Haynes suggests, is partly because both, in their fashion, are great actors who play on their femininity to hide coldly calculating natures.
![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. May December Film Still SKY SEAC](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEI_179640010.jpg?w=760)
As Elizabeth digs deeper into the pair’s history and hears conflicting accounts of what occurred (from ex-husbands to estranged children), the married couple begin to relive – and re-consider – their own history. The result is sometimes queasily hilarious: Haynes plays on the discomfort with dramatic zooms and a knowingly overplayed, amusingly operatic score.
Portman and Moore are powerful, charismatic on-screen forces, particularly in a moment where Portman plays a direct-to-camera monologue as Gracie with disturbing chameleonic gravitas. But the heart of the film lies with the vulnerable, sheltered spirit played by Melton – and his slow realisation of just how poisonous his “romance” has been. Watching his face convulse with a deep sob at the sight of his children’s high school graduation, as he contemplates all of the childhood milestones of which he’s been robbed, is heartbreaking.
With May December, Haynes cleverly pulls the rug from beneath gendered ideas about #MeToo and sexual abuse, and has the nerve to imply female monstrousness has its own unique rhythm. A combination of rollicking, darkly delicious entertainment and brilliantly rendered character study, this has the making of a modern classic.