Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman in Todd Haynes’ film
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Todd Haynes’ film “May December”, which was bought by Netflix for $11 million after its premiere in Cannes and is now being released in Russia, talks about how to play love between an adult woman and a teenager according to Stanislavsky’s system.
The American South, a quiet provincial town where everyone knows each other. The sun is shining, butterflies are laying eggs, high school students are preparing for graduation. An ideal family gathers neighbors for a barbecue: Grace, the mother of a large family, her husband Joe, their twin children – brother and sister, who are about to graduate from school and fly away from the family nest. The eldest daughter is already in college. Joe works at a hospital and breeds monarch butterflies in his spare time. Grace bakes cakes to sell and hunts quail with a gun. At the barbecue, Grace will see Elizabeth for the first time, an actress who came specifically to meet the family. She should play the role of Grace in an indie film, and for this she needs to get into the role, get into Grace’s shoes, find out how she bakes cherry pie and talks to children, find out how she and Joe first met. And doesn’t Grace have a feeling of guilt for the fact that twenty-odd years ago she, by that time already an adult married thirty-six-year-old woman, seduced thirteen-year-old Joe?
No regrets. Moreover, Grace has already served time for this, gave birth to a daughter in prison, and after serving time, she married Joe. And now they, as has already been said, and will be said more than once, have an ideal family.
Director Todd Haynes, a genre deconstructor, loves to show the ideal – and watch how hell hatches from that ideal. To do this, he does not need to, like David Lynch in Blue Velvet, move the camera away from the green grass and into the ground infested with bugs. Haynes never directly shows the underlying reality, he just slightly skews the color settings, almost imperceptibly. Or forces heroes to be too honest in situations where it would not occur to anyone. Or he gives them a plot that is not talked about in polite society, and sees what they will do – no, not with the plot, but with themselves.
The engine of “May December” is the confrontation between Grace and Elizabeth, the confrontation between real life and cinema, the confrontation between what others think of us and what we are afraid to admit to ourselves. The confrontation between seducers and victims, who constantly change places. And of course, we shouldn’t forget about the collateral damage: Grace’s son from her first marriage obviously hasn’t been able to recover for these twenty years.
At the very beginning of the film “May December” (this expression means an affair between people with a large age difference), Grace opens the refrigerator – and disturbing music begins to sound: obviously, there is something scary in the refrigerator. “We seem to be running out of hot dogs,” Grace announces.
The entire film exists in a pause between disturbing music and an innocent explanation, between passive aggression and tears for a far-fetched reason, between the laying of eggs and the appearance of butterflies. Between the real and the imaginary, finally.
Elizabeth is trying to become Grace’s double, to copy her face, her manners, her life. When, on the set of a film about Grace’s life, after the third, or something, take – all three are terrible, stupid, false – Elizabeth asks to shoot another one, because “we are getting closer to something real” – this proves: there is nothing real in the cinema exists, especially in films based on a true story.
“May December” is based on a real-life scandal from the 1990s. More precisely, the film becomes a system of mirrors in which both real events and European auteur cinema are reflected, primarily Bergman’s “Persona” and Fassbinder’s “Fear Eats the Soul”, and the devastation of “The Graduate”, and Michel Legrand’s music from “The Go-Between”, re-recorded and reinvented by Marcelo Zarvos – but you don’t need to know or remember any of this in order to enjoy “May of December”. From the performance of Julianne Moore – her Grace, the iron lady, bends the whole world and firmly believes in her naivety. It’s a pleasure to see how well Natalie Portman plays a bad actress. From the horribly raunchy scene in which Portman’s character Elizabeth tells high school students in detail how sex scenes are filmed, to the horribly awkward scene in which Grace sobs on her husband’s shoulder. The pleasure of the brilliant dialogue between the two heroines: “My mother wrote a book on epistemological relativism,” says Elizabeth. “Mine is a blueberry cobbler recipe,” Grace replies without blinking. Epistemological relativism states that there is no single correct theory about anything. This blueberry cobbler recipe is essentially a perfect example of this statement.
“May December” is about just that: there are hundreds of blueberry cobbler recipes, none of them more real than the rest. The indie film will tell a very different story about a long-standing scandal than you read in the tabloids.
Haynes has worked with Julianne Moore more than once; she played a housewife in both Salvation (1995) and “Far from Heaven” (2002) – and is not afraid of such roles. The director says he and Moore share the same approach to stories: both prefer stories that don’t involve heroic solutions. All of Haynes’ biopics are about the absence of heroes, all of his melodramas are about how funny human relationships are, he films awkward love stories (“Carol”), confused great musicians, broken into hundreds of fragments (“I’m not there”). His stories about ideal families can scare psychotherapists, and all his films are about people “who don’t know how to feel.”
And with each of his films, Todd Haynes makes the viewer doubt stereotypes, the picture of an ideal American family, and the picture in general. In words. In feelings, especially in your own. In Stanislavsky’s system. The fact is that butterflies are beautiful. The fact is that hot dogs can be enough.
In theaters from February 29
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