On Saturday, (May 20), the movie “May December” had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023. The film is directed by Todd Haynes and the cast consists of stars such as Natalie Portman, Charles Melton and Julianne Moore.
The film surrounds Elizabeth, (played by Natalie Portman), who travels to Maine in order to study the life of Gracie, (played by Julianne Moore). Gracie was previously jailed for having a relationship with an underaged boy Joe, (played by Charles Melton), with whom she is married to later on.
When commenting on the film during a press conference at Cannes Film Festival, Julianne Moore explained that “My character is someone who transgresses, and how do we address that? When is age inappropriate? When people are in different places developmentally. This is not appropriate and why we have boundaries around that.”
Todd Haynes later on said that: “There are problematic aspects as to how this relationship began, which works towards a conflict at the end. And yet this is complicated by the fact that this relationship endured. Yes, there’s disparity of age, there are human transgressions, but these are opportunities for us to look at ourselves and the culture we live in. For some of my films, that’s been a recurring subject.”
When asked about the title, Todd Haynes explained that it referred to an English expression for a relationship with an age-gap. After a pause he also added, “In France, they call it the Macron”.
After the screening of “May December” at Cannes Film Festival, it received an eight-minute standing ovation in the Grand Théâtre Lumière. The premiere started with almost a 40-minute delay due to the late start of the movie that was screening before them, Martin Scorsese’s film “Killers of the Flower Moon”.
The crowd was a bit tired after watching the three and a half hours long film “Killers of the Flower Moon”, however, the eight-minute standing ovation shows that Haynes’ movie must have been a hit that made the crowd forget about their tiredness.
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credit: Festival de Cannes