Has any contemporary filmmaker come as close to perfecting the melodrama as much as Todd Haynes? To deifying it, to condemning it, and to finding a ground on which its politics can be realized finally for all that were ignored before? While the likes of Sirk or Vidor fomented the possibilities, the Classical Hollywood’s “woman’s pictures” may have been a bitter reactionary canvas that catalyzed a spectacle of misery, a way to both console and exploit the societal despair of women (the audience’s retroactive observations of latent texts in these stories elevate their status today). It’s a world of beautiful women, trapped inside beautiful frames, saying beautiful things that echo the beautiful strings that fill the air. While many would swoon at the sight of the rose, it’s the thorns that Haynes is most interested in, that he perhaps wished were more apparent and more thorny. He made Far From Heaven, with a bit of vengeance for all the things that the genre failed to acknowledge in the past. He made Carol, dreaming of the genre free from the mold of hetero-narrative and male gaze. May December, his newest film, a return to “woman’s picture,” has an odd edge to it never before seen in his melodrama canon, tracing the genre in the present tense, and then letting it shoot off, treacherously so, into the future.
The “woman” of this picture is Gracie (Julianne Moore), whose life had undergone a maelstrom a couple decades ago after having an illicit affair with a local 13-year-old boy Joe (Charles Melton), later having his child, then marrying him right when he came of age. Now the two maintain the facade of an American nuclear family in the suburbs, with roses in the garden and pastries in lovely boxes to send to friends, somehow having put the past scandal to rest. Then another woman enters the picture: Elizabeth (Natalie Portman). She is an actress – attractive, professional, and inscrutable in all the typical actor ways; she is herself kind of a rose. Here to interview Gracie in order to play her in the dramatization of her life, Elizabeth’s intentions are seemingly harmless, benevolent even. The two women, inhabiting the same space, looking into the same mirror, start to observe each other, but where Carol convinced us that looking is like falling in love, here, looking is an aggression, a quiet mutilation, like stabbing someone very gently. And when it’s between two people who are chronically primed to beware of other people looking at them, it’s like a battle, whether they know it or not.
As soon as we notice the clear vestiges of child rape and all the ways that the couple’s dynamic is irreversibly fucked up, by the time we instinctively realize that Elizabeth isn’t in it for anyone else but for the vicious, obscure, often manipulative forces as “craft” or “art,” we know it’s all a game – of manipulations on top of manipulations by people whose language is hopelessly bound to it. One where victimhood can just as much be an apparatus as empowerment can be an illusion. It’s all a kind of twisted game, you see – says Todd Haynes – the sharp edges, the irony, the madness of living as a woman in the modern world where everyone is a little too self-aware or not self-aware enough. Perhaps this irony is where the genre of “woman’s picture” finally finds itself in the Cinema of the present, will find itself. Likewise, the most salient markers of the genre, including the bizarre, soap-operatic music (resituating the work of late Michel Legrand on the 1971 film The Go-Between), come off somewhat sadistic, like a taunting, a challenge for us to stomach this wonderfully disturbing game and at the end lapse into the bruising tragedy with a devilish smile. Pity the modern women, in all their misery, the genre used to tell us. Now, with May December, it may be saying – hail modern women, and their cruelty.
Who knew the Mario impressionist wrote such tasteful and eloquent reviews
You know what i’m gonna say to this
Wah yah yippie?