Todd Haynes did it again! His new movie that premiered yesterday, 20th of May, at the Cannes Film Festival will definitely be a source for a lot of discussion as well as the real story that the film based on.
“May December” recalls the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Washington State schoolteacher who became a registered sex offender after pleading guilty to the second-degree rape of a 13-year-old boy from her sixth grade class in 1997. Probably because of her death in 2020 it became easier to adapt this story to the big screen.
But of course a master like Todd Haynes would not be interested just in a recreation of the story that once became a tabloid sensation. The studying of characters which is usually precedes any shooting process is raised in this film to another level.
Acting by Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore is superb. Also no doubt that we will see more of Charles Melton in the near future. Composer Marcelo Zarvos is reunited with director Todd Haynes after working with him in “Far from Heaven” and “Carol” by adding some horror notes into the psychological drama.
At the press-conference of “May December”, In answering my question about the title, Todd Haynes commented that it relates to the English expression for the kind of relationships between a very young and rather mature person. In French, he said, it will be called more like “À la Macron”
Lena Basse
