Review Round-up: Todd Haynes 'May December' Wows at Cannes

"May December," out film icon Todd Haynes first narrative film since 2019's "Dark Waters," wowed its Cannes audience when it premiered on Saturday in competition for the Palme d'Or .

"Todd Haynes returned to the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night with his latest, May December, playing in competition. The complex melodrama starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore scored an eight-minute standing ovation inside the Grand Theatre Lumière," reports Deadline.

Though the screening was delayed for 40-minute due to the lengthy presentation of Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which runs three-and-a-half hours. Nonetheless, Deadline adds, "The enthusiastic response in Cannes' biggest venue was at least matched by a simultaneous press screening at the adjacent Debussy Theatre, where there was huge applause – a rare feat for the press core here."

Sonny Burch's screenplay (based on a story Burch wrote with Alex Mechanik) "Haynes tells the story of two women at two stages of their lives," adds Deadline.. "A painful turn to the past for the older star in her sixties, who wants to turn the page, faced with a sincere and dangerous search for the truth from a Hollywood star at the top of her career. Between the two, the male character of Joe (Charles Melton) subtly weaves threads between the actresses and the eras."

Unlike Scorsese, who hasn't had a film at Cannes since "After Hours' in 1985, "Haynes is a Cannes regular. His last movie here was 2021's Velvet Underground, which screened out of competition, and was preceded by such competition entries as 2017's Wonderstruck, 2015's Carol and 1998's Velvet Goldmine. Carol notably scored the Best Actress prize in Cannes for Rooney Mara. She was later nominated for an Oscar, as was lead Cate Blanchett."

The early reviews are in and they are mostly raves:

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Haynes is not really known as a comedy director. But that's the genre "May December" most closely resembles, dark as its matters may be. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a Juilliard-trained actor who stars on a hit TV series and is researching a role for an independent film. She travels to Savannah, Georgia to meet her subject, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a baker and former tabloid celebrity who was imprisoned for statutory rape after embarking on a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy, Joe, who worked at the pet store she managed. It was a huge story in the 1990s, just as teacher Mary Kay Letourneau's was in our world...

With a lightness not exactly typical of Haynes, "May December" fascinatingly explores its ethical dimensions, one foot planted firmly in the realm of camp while the other figures out where to land. At various points, it seems the film will mutate into a thriller–what with Elizabeth's asthma and the heavy foreshadowing of Gracie's love of hunting. At other times, the film could be settling into a solemn drama about humble people just trying to live decent lives in the years after a media frenzy.

Ultimately, the film is neither thriller nor drama. Samy Burch's script teems with idiosyncratic humor, not quite John Waters but somewhere on the road to that. Softening the comedy, at least somewhat, is the film's tentative compassion for these people, for the way their lives have healed over–but not actually healed–the horrible transgression of the past. They are stuck in a sorry delusion. In that light, perhaps only Elizabeth, played so shrewdly by Portman, is the truly cynical one, a vampire artist troubling these strange waters to study how the fish react.

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

There's a postmodernist horror movie about performance as predation hidden beneath the semiotician's gaze in Todd Haynes' "May December," a complex drama that's intrinsically intimate and yet also detached, at times almost clinical. The director is poking around in territory that's familiar to him – self-knowledge and public perception, identity and duality, transparency and performance, social norms and the sexual outlaw. But the emotional volatility of the story ends up being somewhat muted by the approach, likely making this a tough sell beyond Haynes' devoted admirers.

What will give the film a significant degree of traction, however, are the riveting performances of Natalie Portman and frequent Haynes muse Julianne Moore, as two women at cross purposes, one seeking to excavate the past and another who has spent two decades endeavoring to bury it. An astonishing monologue delivered by Portman into a mirror in particular demands to be seen. But both leads do transfixing work with characters who constantly reveal different sides of themselves, which is fitting given that one of Haynes' acknowledged inspirations was Bergman's "Persona."...

The lead actors ensure that it's always fascinating, but despite the raw nature of the wounds reopened, it's all a bit glacial. Blauvelt's camera gets in close at regular intervals to the lush vegetation from which Joe gathers tiny eggs for his hobby of breeding monarch butterflies. Those images hint at a hothouse atmosphere of which the rather academic "May December "could have used a bit more.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire

A heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp that teases real human drama from the stuff of tabloid sensationalism, Todd Haynes' delicious "May December" continues the director's tradition of making films that rely upon the self-awareness that seems to elude their characters – especially the ones played by Julianne Moore.

Here, the actress reteams with her "Safe" director to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo, a lispy former school teacher who became a household name back in 1992 when she left her ex-husband for one of her 13-year-old students. Now it's 2015, the situation has normalized somewhat, and Gracie and Joe (a dad bod Charles Melton) have been together long enough that their youngest children are about to graduate high school. The occasional package full of poop still arrives at the waterside Savannah mansion that Gracie and Joe paid for with appearances on "Inside Edition," but such deliveries – gifts from random strangers who can't stomach the couple's love story – have become less common now that their scandalous romance has settled into suburban reality. Or so it would appear.

Written by Samy Burch, whose script Haynes seems to have tweaked into a catty-as-fuck dark comedy that deepens his longstanding obsession with performance while poking fun at the kind of actresses he clearly loves so much, "May December" introduces itself as a piece of minimalism pitched somewhere between "All About Eve" and "Persona."

Peter DeBruge. Variety

A heady director whose entire oeuvre feels ripe for film-studies dissertations, Haynes makes movies not merely to be watched, but to be analyzed and deconstructed after the fact. From the rich Douglas Sirkian pastiche of "Far From Heaven" to the queer twist on classical "woman's pictures" provided by "Carol," his style can be chilly and distancing. Not so "May December." As layered and infinitely open-to-interpretation as any of his films, it's also the most generous and direct, beginning not with Ingmar Bergman references (those come later), but with footage of monarch butterflies. They're symbols of transformation, too, but also something nice to look at (and listen to, underscored by a lush reworking of the piano theme from "The Go-Between") before these two women meet.

"May December" operates on many levels at once, allowing audiences to speculate as to Gracie's motivations (the reason we are drawn to movies like the one being made about her) even as we watch Elizabeth "become" her character. At night, she goes back to the local home she's renting – "quaint," by her description, posh by anyone else's – and watches video auditions with the underage actors who could be her co-star, remarking that they're "not sexy enough." Her interactions with the real-life Joe become increasingly flirtatious, to the point one can't help but wonder whether Elizabeth feels she needs to seduce him in order to understand Gracie.

Tim Robey, The Telegraph

No one's life is a story in their own eyes; everyone's is to other people. How we can ever know one another fully, or look in the mirror with objectivity, are fairly profound questions, and rich themes for Todd Haynes in "May December" – a teasing, ticklish, fascinatingly layered study of our defined identities and the isolation that comes with them. It's about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to...

Haynes's compassionate eye on the hysteria underlying domestic contentment is at peak strength here; his chosen score, adapted from Michel Legrand's themes from "The Go-Between" (1971), is a juicy homage to that other melodrama of stolen innocence, in which the past was a foreign country. Here, it's the people who are stalking gimlet-eyed across each other's borders, and still understanding nothing.

Xan Brooks, The Guardian

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore play actor and subject in "May December," the enjoyable tale of a fraught creative collaboration that finally promises more than it delivers. Director Todd Haynes adores playing with the pieces of traditional Hollywood cinema, like a kid with a train set, or his mum's makeup box, to the point where the artifice becomes the main thrust of his story. If "May December" is guilty of making hysterical mountains out of molehills, then, this is partly the point. That's Hollywood movies for you. They turn every crisis into a pre-packaged drama...

Haynes's film – which competes for the Cannes Palme d'Or – sets itself up as a tense chamber piece, a study of merging identities and shifting power dynamics in the manner of Joseph Losey's "The Servant" or Ingmar Bergman's "Persona." But "May December" also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap ...

Haynes's drama, to its credit, is aware of the issue and shows its repercussions – the way it reduces the performers and the people they portray – but it's too knowing and glossy to drive this message home. Elizabeth's ridiculous film-within-a-film is surely bound to miss its mark. For all its relish and abandon, I fear that May December does too.

As a practitioner of contemporary melodrama – with "Far From Heaven" and "Carol "showing how perfectly he had mastered the teachings of Douglas Sirk – Haynes makes intriguing work of subtly metafictional psychodrama in "May December", the story of an actress researching her role in a film about a scandalous cause célèbre

Scripted by first-timer Samy Burch, this Cannes Competition entry offers sly stylistic play, together with a terrific pairing of two performers on great form – Natalie Portman and long-term Haynes lead Julianne Moore, engaged in brisk mirror play. This combination should add commercial appeal to a very grown-up package that may be upmarket niche, but should receive a solid prestige reception...

Melton's performance is the revelation of the film, gradually breaking Joe down from a gentle, affable hunk to someone whose psyche has been ground down by long-term stress. Moore, meanwhile, unpacks Gracie with characteristic steely nerve, in a performance that mixes neurotic fragility and over-bearing brittleness in a manner somewhat reminiscent of her role in Tom Kalin's 2007 Savage Grace. And, meshing tightly with Moore in a visual construction that often makes the mirror games literal, Portman makes Elizabeth a genuinely mysterious figure – seeming to hide her real self, as actors sometimes do, while absorbing aspects of Grace. She is sometimes an apparent ingenue detective, at others manifestly manipulative.