With Deauville still in the cards for a premiere, NYFF’s Dennis Lim has beat to the punch the likes of Telluride and TIFF for May December . The North American premiere for Todd Haynes’ latest will open (September 29th) the 61st New York Film Festival. Netflix give the film a November 17th theatrical release prior to a wide launch on the streamer on December 1st. Haynes has been at the fest countless times.
In the film Charles Melton play Gracie and Joe, a married couple with a 20-year age gap. Their relationship sparked a national tabloid scandal because Joe was just 13 when the two fell in love. Decades later, their union is put to the test when Portman’s character Elizabeth, a popular TV actress, travels to Georgia to study the life of Gracie, whom she’ll be playing in a movie.
In our review of the film our Nicholas Bell had a lot of comparison points: “Much like Woody Allen revisited the Lana Turner-Johnny Stompanato scandal in his 1987 September, this script from Samy Burch and Alex Mechanic deviously revamps the Mary Kay Letourneau furor for a deliriously kitschy identity play between two women who each display a multitude of behavioral and emotional issues. Playfully perverse, Haynes delivers a troubling farce unfolding like a Harold Robbins penned Bertolucci film.”
Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).
