“May December” focuses on Elizabeth (Portman), a popular TV actress set to star in a movie about a teacher, Gracie (Moore), who was imprisoned after she was caught with the pupil. Gracie and the student, Joe (a revelatory Charles Melton), married and had several children. The movie opens around the same time that Elizabeth arrives in Gracie’s waterfront hometown, settling into a visit with unexpected consequences. In an effort to find the role, Elizabeth tries to learn what makes Gracie tick, yet the deeper the actress explores her subject, the more she chips away at the couple’s happily-ever-after.
As he has done throughout a career that includes “Far From Heaven” and “Carol,” Haynes uses melodramatic conventions to fascinating effect, though he does so here with jolts of rich, destabilizing humor. Elizabeth may be searching for a character, but Gracie has already found the role of a lifetime as a martyr to her own desires, a part she perfects with waves of self-pity and monstrous narcissism. Playing with shifting tones and modes of realism, Haynes explores the intersection of real life and the self as a performance, routinely deploying flourishes of dramatic music that once could have accompanied a Joan Crawford meltdown but also have been rich comic fodder for the likes of Carol Burnett.
“May December” would make quite the seasonal double bill with “Last Summer,” the latest from the French auteur Catherine Breillat. A terrific Léa Drucker stars as an outwardly content, happily married lawyer and mother whose carefully ordered world is profoundly rocked with the arrival of her husband’s 17-year-old son (Samuel Kircher). Once the kid arrives and peels off his shirt, playing peekaboo under a crown of floppy hair, it seems fairly clear where the story is headed. Yet there’s nothing obvious about this movie, which, with shifting camera angles, differing points of view and gradually escalating emotional violence, creates an extraordinarily complex inquiry into desire and power.
“Last Summer” will probably continue on the international festival circuit in the fall, though it is unlikely to generate as much attention as some of the most excitedly received features here. Among the buzziest has been “The Zone of Interest,” a soulless formalist exercise from the British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. Based on the novel by Martin Amis of the same title, it takes place largely inside the walled grounds of a house immediately adjacent to Auschwitz. There, as pillars of smoke rise in the sky, the death camp’s commandant (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller) are living their lives — eating, raising children, somehow sleeping — to the nonstop sounds of screams, shouts and gunfire.
