“May December,” Todd Haynes’s tenth feature, spins a profoundly layered psychological drama from potentially cheap tabloid copy: the true-life scandal of Mary Kay Letourneau, a…
Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
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Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah!
“May December,” Todd Haynes’s tenth feature, spins a profoundly layered psychological drama from potentially cheap tabloid copy: the true-life scandal of Mary Kay Letourneau, a schoolteacher and married mother of four who began a sexual affair with one of her sixth-grade students. Samy Burch’s script fictionalises the story into a complex study of female mirroring, starring Natalie Portman as an A-list actress preparing to play Julianne Moore’s Letourneau-like pariah.
At the Zurich Film Festival, Haynes dropped into the Variety Lounge to explain why he was instantly intrigued by Burch’s script after Portman passed it to him — and how it eventually became his fifth collaboration with Moore, his eternal muse. “The way [Natalie] talked about the moral gray areas that we both were intrigued by reminded me of somebody I know very well,” he recalls. Moore, he says, is “drawn to these kinds of characters that unnerve us, that perplex us, that are hard to reach, to fully assess” — “May December” played right into that dark sweet spot.
He’s amused by the number of critics referring to the film as camp, or soap opera-adjacent, having instead taken inspiration from such European arthouse masters as Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard: “It was not anything that I was trying to do at all, and when you watch the film, there’s a very austere, restrained camera through so much of it.”
As a queer filmmaker, meanwhile, he’s disheartened by the current political era: “If anything, we’re back to the conservative voice that I confronted in my first film.” And confront it he will in his next project, a gay interracial love story set in 1930s Los Angeles starring Joaquin Phoenix — Haynes reveals more in our conversation.
Watch the full conversation above.