The new romantic drama ‘May December’ directed by Todd Haynes premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night. The movie sheds light on the way women who break society’s rules are held to much stricter standards than badly behaving men. In the movie, Julianne Moore plays a woman whose relationship with a 13-year-old boy drew national tabloid headlines. Director Todd Haynes said, ‘We expect this of men, these transgressions. We don’t of women. And we think ‘what about her family? What about her kids?’ So the women are also burdened with an extra and unequal amount of criticism when this is the very same thing that can happen with people.’
The couple are still together two decades later when an actor – played by Natalie Portman – inserts herself into their life to prepare for a starring role in the film version of Moore’s story. Her often boundary-crossing presence dredges up uncomfortable questions that Moore’s husband, played by Charles Melton of ‘Riverdale’, had never fully considered before.
‘There are incredibly problematic aspects to how this relationship began, which this film works toward a confrontation of toward the end,’ Haynes told journalists. ‘Yet this is so complicated by the fact that this relationship endured.’
The movie’s title refers to an older-younger relationship, and some people in France call it ‘Le Macron’.
