May December

Viewer Advice: Includes strong impact sexual themes that some may find distressing. Viewer discretion is advised.

Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman team up in Todd Haynes’s perfectly camp melodrama that dredges up a sexual scandal, which screened in competition at Cannes.

At 36, Gracie (Moore) caused a worldwide furore and landed herself behind bars after her predatory sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy was made public. Some 20 years later, with Gracie now married to him with children of their own, the complexities resurface when actor Elizabeth (Portman) arrives in their hometown of Savannah, Georgia, ahead of playing her in an upcoming biopic. But Elizabeth’s stripping of her subject’s layers triggers a crossing of boundaries – from every which way.

With unsurprising depth, Portman and Moore – the latter starring in her fourth Haynes film after Safe (MIFF 1996), Far From Heaven and I’m Not There – deliver captivating performances, while Riverdale’s Charles Melton deserves commendation as the baby-faced husband Joe. As an intertextual touch, the theatrical score by Marcelo Zarvos is adapted from the piano-led one used in Joseph Losey’s 1971 illicit-romance flick The Go-Between; at times deliberately incongruous with surrounding events, it adds a dose of humour to an otherwise unnerving undercurrent.

“A closely focused character study, galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore, which delves into areas more conventional dramas don’t go near.” – The Independent