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, the latest of the filmmaker’s torrid, probing melodramas. It has a plot that could come straight from a prurient TV soap opera, but Haynes – best known for films such as Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015) – comes at his material with an intensity that rekindles memories of some of Ingmar Bergman’s most fraught and closely focused character studies. He also elicits superb performances from his two leads, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.
Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a movie star who travels to Savannah, Georgia, to research her new role. In her next film, she is going to play Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who, two decades before, was at the centre of a tabloid scandal after having an affair with a seventh-grader (that’s to say a boy who was 13 years old).
