Elizabeth is a well-known actress who is about to play the leading role in a film inspired by a true story: that of Gracie and Joe. Years before, Gracie, then aged 36, was jailed for having sex with Joe, 13 at the time. They have since married and had three children, now young adults. But now the apparent serenity of their home is undermined by the arrival of Elizabeth, who has come to “study” Gracie. Very freely inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau affair, May Decemberby Todd Haynes, sees Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore engage in a disturbing but captivating pas de deux.
There is something insidious, on purpose, in the filmmaker’s aesthetic choices. For example, as if to alleviate the off-putting dimension of the subject, Haynes and his director of photography, Christopher Blauvelt (registered collaborator of Kelly Reichardt; Certain Women, First Cow), opt for a very sunny style, where many compositions are bathed in vaporous rays of light.
It’s a clever decoy, in tune with the point. Moreover, the film offers a whole series of games on the theme of deceptive appearances. For example, the characters all turn out to be representations of each other, starting with Elizabeth (brilliant Natalie Portman).
In the privacy of the house she rents, without an audience, Elizabeth is contemptuous and calculating. In the presence of Gracie (always excellent Julianne Moore, in her 5e collaboration with the director of Far From Heaven/Far from paradise), by Joe (moving Charles Melton, Reggie in the series Riverdale) and their offspring, she is on the contrary all sugar, all honey, and the very incarnation of empathy – the winner of an Oscar for Black Swan (The black swan) then deliberately plays “false” in order to highlight Elizabeth’s lack of sincerity.
The relationship between Gracie and Joe is presented as problematic behind a now clean facade. Gracie rules Joe, with gentleness but grip: she is the mother and he, the child. Such dynamics are common among couples of all sexes, but here, Gracie and Joe’s backgrounds give it a disturbing connotation (again, on purpose).
Moreover, the film suggests that Joe remained at the adolescent stage. Thus, thanks to his passion for butterflies, which he raises, we see an egg give birth to a caterpillar, which moves into a chrysalis from which a butterfly will emerge. In this regard, the vision of Joe restoring his freedom to a monarch is made all the more poignant as it becomes clear that he himself was never able to reach this stage of fulfillment, symbolically speaking.
A sequence where, for the first time in his life, Joe smokes a joint, proves overwhelming: uninhibited, Joe allows himself painful confidences. During all these years, would he have remained frozen in a sort of state of astonishment? Interestingly, the three children he had with Gracie are now reacting, in various ways, against their mother…
Pretense and concealment
In a manner as subtle as it is ingenious, in the long shots set in Gracie and Joe’s house, Todd Haynes willingly films the characters against the light or veils their faces in shadow. The impression of concealment – from others, from oneself – is reinforced.
Conversely, numerous close-ups of mirrors where Elizabeth and Gracie position themselves (facing the camera), as a duo or separately, only increase the opacity of their respective intentions and motivations.
The contrast between these two formal processes works superbly within the framework of this film which, at times, resembles a cross between the film Personaby Ingmar Bergman, and the novel The Talented Mister Ripley (Mister Ripley), by Patricia Highsmith, two works where one personality is vampirized by another (note that the Carolby Haynes, is based on a novel by Highsmith).
That being said, May December explores concerns of its own. Certainly, there are touches of very black humor when Haynes satirizes the notion of “real life” in cinema through extracts from false sensationalist and corny TV films. For the most part, however, his film focuses, like Elizabeth, but without the opportunism of the latter, on peeling back the layers of the couple formed by Gracie and Joe until it reaches its rotten heart.
Anything but light, May December is no less fascinating, with all-round virtuosity helping.