Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
CANNES, France—A melodramatic score blares. A camera pulls in on a soft focus image of Julianne Moore staring inside a fridge. It seems like we’re getting ready for a big revelation, something out of the soap opera playbook. Instead she says, with immense gravity: “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.” This is Todd Haynes’ May December, the latest movie to rock the Cannes Film Festival.
Saturday was a busy night on the Croisette. Not only did it mark the premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, it also saw the introduction of Haynes’ latest, a wonderfully tawdry, upsetting, and often hilarious film, that leans into its tabloid inspirations through an art house lens and features a breakout role for Charles Melton of Riverdale fame.
It would seem like these two movies couldn’t be more different, but I felt a theme running through my Cannes viewing that night: The lies people tell themselves to justify their own atrocious actions. Haynes just tackles this with a dose of a camp and two of our great actresses acting their faces off.