In Todd Haynes’ tonally shape-shifting “May December,” the primary announcement of the film’s playful intentions comes with a theatrical zoom in, a few lushly melodramatic piano notes and the frightful announcement that there no extra sizzling canine within the fridge.
That second — which Haynes says alerts “that there’s something coy happening in the language of the film” — is simply a style of what is to return in “May December,” a scrumptious and disquieting drama laced with comedy and camp that Haynes premiered over the weekend at the Cannes Film Festival.
Natalie Portman stars as an actor researching an upcoming movie that is to dramatize a scandal from 20 years earlier. She involves Savannah, Georgia, to spend time with Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who years earlier change into tabloid fodder for a sexual relationship with a seventh grader. Now, she’s seemingly fortunately married to him, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), with youngsters of their very own and suburban barbeques to host.
The movie, scripted by Samy Burch, takes a gentle however deliberate contact in navigating by way of thorny themes of efficiency and identification. As Portman’s character grows more and more like Gracie, moral borders start to tumble away.
“It was tonally such an amazing script and so rigorous,” Haynes stated in an interview alongside Portman. “It kept shifting the way you felt about or trusted one character versus another. That whole process as it maneuvered through the course of the script was such a compelling experience. And I just thought: Wow, how could you translate into visually?”
“May December,” which Netflix acquired Tuesday for a reported $11 million with plans to launch later this yr, is the primary time Haynes (who has recurrently labored with Moore) has made a film with the 41-year-old Portman. For her, “May December” was a likelihood to not solely work with a director she’s lengthy admired however discover a few of her personal fascinations.
“It poses a lot of the questions I’m most obsessed by about performance, about the purpose of art, about innocence,” says Portman, additionally a producer on the movie.
“When you explore all those layers — playing someone who’s playing someone, making a movie of a movie in a movie — there’s so many layers of artifice, and what truth we can get out of artifice — which is the kind of alchemy of what we do,” provides Portman. “We’re using lies to tell the truth, and it’s magic.”
“May December” has some unofficial roots in actuality. Gracie is not very totally different in sure methods from Mary Kay Letourneau, a Washington State schoolteacher who went to jail after a relationship with a boy in her sixth grade class.
Questions of identification and artifice have run by way of Haynes’ filmography, together with the splendid ’50s romance “Carol,” the Douglas Sirk-inspired melodrama “Far from Heaven” and his most up-to-date movie, the documentary “The Velvet Underground.” In Portman, he discovered an actor who shared a related method to movie.
“Plenty of narrative filmmaking and fiction-making has an inside want to redeem oneself by way of the method, to kind of affirm one’s personal goals. That’s the factor that I’m not notably fascinated about as a director,” says Haynes. “And I’m drawn to actors who really feel equally, who’re truly fascinated about creating a distance between perhaps their very own values and concepts and people portrayed within the character.”
He praised Portman’s eagerness to have interaction with “and lean into the most disquieting aspects of the character.”
Portman has famously performed some real-life figures, like Jacqueline Kennedy (“Jackie”), which required copious quantities of analysis. But in “May December,” she performs an actor much more reckless than herself. Yet even in a efficiency that might have simply slid into satire, Portman deftly inhabits her.
“Most artists who tell stories want to hold up their ethical standpoint in the light. It can be vampiric to take human emotion and human story and capitalize on it and tell a story,” Portman says. “But hopefully the energy that you come to it with is empathy and the curiosity to explore someone’s human behavior and someone’s inner self. That it’s an act of empathy and not an act of bloodsucking.”
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There have been lengthy conversations with Haynes and Moore as they ready to make “May December” in a 30-day taking pictures spring. But, in contrast to her character, Portman’s preparation for the half was largely already finished.
“Well,” Portman says smiling, “I’ve spent my whole life researching how to be an actress.”