A unique cinematographic work
In Safe (1995), Todd Haynes’ second feature, Julianne Moore plays a bourgeois woman who suffers in a strange way: she could personify what the writer Betty Friedan described as the “evil that has no name”, in relation with the hidden discomfort of upper-middle-class women trapped in domestic spaces that they seem to control without, however, having power in the family institution. In the filmmaker’s other films that explore the terrain of melodrama, such as the magnificent Far from Paradise and Carol, there are more women trapped in family structures from which they are expelled or freed: Cathy Whitaker (also played by Moore) discovers her husband’s homosexuality and, with it, the falsity of the family paradise, and Carol (Cate Blanchett) makes a radical decision out of love for another woman. In May December, which has been renamed as Secrets of a Scandal in Spanish distribution, Julianne Moore (Gracie) plays a woman who, for the first time in a Haynes film, is not only in control of the ‘domestic space, but also the power within an atypical family, but where a normativity is also imposed.
An unusual relationship
It is difficult to define the socioeconomic conditions of May December’s family, consisting of Gracie, her husband Joe (who is twenty-two years younger than her), and their three children, two of whom are twins. They don’t seem to have a lot of financial resources, but they live in a comfortable enough house in Savannah, Georgia, while the older daughter is in college and the younger ones will be going there soon. What makes this family atypical? It’s not just the age difference between the couple. The relationship began when she was 35 (she was married with three children) and he was 13. With a script that came to Haynes when he was hired by Natalie Portman (the other female lead) as a producer, the The film is inspired by a real case that scandalized American society in the early 90s: Mary Kay Letourneau, a thirty-year-old teacher married with three children, was sentenced to prison for having sexual relations with a student Thirteen-year-old Vili Fualaau, of Korean origin. Although Letourneau was forbidden to approach the boy, the relationship resumed and continued until her death in 2020.
A fascinating film
In the film it is made clear that, from the beginning, Gracie has dominated the relationship, but also, by the time it is addressed, Joe (who collects butterflies, who seem as trapped as he is ) feels a dissatisfaction: the children grow up and leave home to lead a life that he never had. An intruder interferes in the couple: an actress who contacts Gracie to play her in a TV movie who wants to reconstruct the initial moment of the relationship with Joe. It’s no coincidence that the actress, played by Portman, is named Elizabeth, the same name as Liv Ullmann’s character (another actress) in Persona. More than a possession or a vampirization, as in the case of Bergman’s legendary film, there is a mirroring, a confrontation, which unbalances both. Without moralism, with his usual complexity and intelligence, Haynes gives us a fascinating, disturbing film with a peculiar humor and an undercurrent of sadness. A reflective cinematographic work (with reflections through the presence of mirrors, which are sometimes the camera: a question about identity) about how a fiction can be a betrayal of the reality that can inspire it.
