OFFICIAL SELECTION – COMPETITION
Todd Haynes, 62, presents a profile that contrasts with rising America. Homosexual, half-Jewish, fiercely independent filmmaker, friend and producer of Kelly Reichardt. So many characteristics that distance him from the Trumpian hinterland, this to say nothing of his cinema, cruel and melancholy, hemmed with portraits of women (far from paradise in 2002 ; carol in 2015), crossed by a structuring love of melodrama, and giving a crucial part to music in its inspiration.
May-Decemberhis new film with such an Allenian title, thus seems punctuated by the reworked and iterative score of the Messenger, by Joseph Losey, signed in his time by Michel Legrand. Splendid music, with poignant and unforgettable chords, used in a no less magnificent film (Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1971) in which a poor boy from the city is invited by a classmate to the family castle, where , instrumentalized by the adults, he will serve as a clandestine messenger between the daughter of the household, engaged to a man of his condition, and the virile sharecropper of the estate.
Enigma of the past, scandal and misalliance, lie and injury, class divide, inform, as well, May December, presented in competition on Saturday 20 May. In Savannah (Georgia), in a superb house overlooking the river, live Gracie (Julianne Moore), a fragile middle-class woman surrounded by Irish setters, and Joe (Charles Melton), a silent Korean-American and butterfly collector who gives her back half of her his age.
Buried discomfort
In anticipation of a film dedicated to Gracie’s life, her actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), arrives in town to, with her agreement, study her model there. As his work progresses, we understand that a heavy past is the cause of the shooting of this film. Gracie, then already married and a mother, met Joe, sweet colossus, at a young age, when he was in 5e, fell madly in love with her, and left her husband to soon start a new family. The tabloids seized on the affair at the time, plunging the city and the young couple into tumult and scandal.
While the two children they had in common are preparing to leave the family home to continue their studies, Gracie and Joe offer themselves to the presence of Elizabeth at a time when this departure weakens them and makes them, no doubt , look back on a painful story that they no longer wanted to think about. Joe appears there as a big child who hasn’t had time to mature, dominated by a wife who spends her days selling her pastries and plays instability and psychic fragility more often than not.
You have 21.7% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.