PLet us imagine that everything started from fascination with the culture of tabloids, true crime and popular “what happened to them” columns. Todd Haynes who is a director in love with melodrama (Far to heavenalso with Julianne Moore, was a tribute to the cinema of Douglas Sirk), doesn’t miss another opportunity to play with fragments of the history of Hollywood costume.
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.
His May Decemberpassed very late last night putting us to the test, puts it on the field two stars, two consummate and very iconic actresses (Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman) to which he entrusts the task of revealing the artifice, the moment of transition, the transformation of reality into images ready for consumption.
From life to screen
Moore is Gracie, a 60-year-old from Savannah, Georgia, Deep South, married to a much younger man. The couple welcomes, during a garden party for the neighborhood (but someone has left a box full of excrement on the doormat, and apparently it’s not the first time), Elisabeth (Portman), the television actress who in a few weeks will have the task of bringing her story to the screen.
Gracie, a quarter of a century earlier, had ended up in prison, as a sex offender, for having had a love story with a 13-year-old student, Joe, who is now her husband and father of 3 children (there are others from the previous marriage, and the relationship with them is stormy, especially with the boy, now grown up (“that story ruined my life”) who was Joe’s classmate).
The family that Gracie and Joe formed and which 25 years later still holds up, has a happy appearance, but Elisabeth’s investigations aimed at return of the “truth of the character” (there seems to be nothing more important) stir dormant and domesticated emotions. What interests Todd Haynes here is above all the process, the metamorphosis, “the gray areas” which Elisabeth talks about during a class on the art of acting given in the class of one of the couple’s daughters during her stay in the city.
Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.
Elisabeth “rehearses” the scenes for the use and consumption of the viewers of the film we are watching (the scene in which the two women put on make-up, where we stand behind an imaginary mirror), even before those for whom the television film is intended come into play that will turn: visit the pet shop where the couple was caught red-handed and mime the seduction with a ghost, it transforms into Gracie like the chrysalises that Joe keeps under glass to admire their transformation into butterflies, beautiful creatures, short-lived and made to be admired. Jonathan Demme had also used them – and they had worked very well – in the Silence of the lambs to tell another unfathomable mystery, that of a serial killer.
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