In ‘May/December,’ Todd Haynes Goes Back to His Depth-Filled Campy Roots [Cannes]

“May/December” really caught me off-guard, but in a positive way. This is Todd Haynes going back to his self-aware cinematic days, think 1995’s brilliant “Safe.”

Based on the ‘90s Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton star as married couple whose 20-year relationship inspired a national tabloid obsession. She was 36, he was 12, they had a sexual relationship. The film is set two decades after those events.

Now preparing to send their grown children off to college, an actress (Natalie Portman) embeds with the family to study them for an upcoming film where she’ll play Moore’s character.

This couple hasn’t probed or even spoken of their illegal affair for decades, they seem happily married, but have these deep pent-up issues that Portman’s actress starts examining as deeply as she can so that she can deliver as honest a performance.

Haynes and DP Christopher Blauvelt, a longtime collaborator of Haynes’ close friend Kelly Reichardt, shoot the film as this campy and satirical treatise on art, performance and marriage. Marcelo Zarvos’ piano-tinged score evokes melodrama at its apex, it drives the film.

This is far from the conventional (albeit entertaining) style of Haynes’ last film (“Dark Waters.”) It’s more reliant on giving the audience a tongue-in-cheek look at this messed up couple. It relies on camp to build character, which isn’t an easy thing to pull off, but Haynes does so, eloquently.

There is very dark humor in this film, but Haynes mixes it with a certain sense and irony and also sincerity. Moore’s disturbed wife is disturbingly vulnerable, she refuses to accept their torrid history and when her younger husband tries to even mention their past, in a very tense bedroom scene, she cracks, in total denial.

Portman, as the note-taking actress, excels in her militant insistence to get into character. Consider the scene where she tries to seduce the Melton character all just to get into the head of what it must have felt like to lust for him. She’s almost as deranged as Moore’s character.

Although too tidy at its conclusion, the force of the film comes in the actress’ relentless examination of this couple. She doesn’t necessarily examine them as much as intensely dissect them until they have nowhere to hide anymore.

Some might find the tone of “May/December” to be too kitschy, a sordidly preposterous film, but they’d be missing the point. I can see Pedro Almodovar tackling this kind of material, it’s very much in his wheelhouse of iconic melodramas.

In “Safe” and “Far From Heaven,” Haynes used outlandish stylizing to tell stories with a deeper meaning behind them. He does that here. Portman and Moore are stunning as tonal opposites who seem to slowly converge into one. You’ve never seen a film quite like this before. [B+]