What on earth would make a woman in her mid-thirties have an affair with a teenage boy? This is the question asked in Todd Haynes’s May December (which received its world premiere in competition in Cannes on Saturday 20 May). The new feature is another of the US director’s probing and torrid melodramas.
It has a plot that could come straight from a prurient TV soap opera but the US director behind Carol (2015) and Far From Heaven (2002) comes at his material with an intensity which rekindles memories of some of Ingmar Bergman’s most fraught and closely focused character studies. He elicits superb performances from his two leads, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.
