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.”
