New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

61st New York Film Festival 2023

SEPTEMBER 29-OCTOBER 15, 2023

FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES
THE NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE OF MAY DECEMBER
AS OPENING NIGHT OF THE 61st NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

[Press release:]

New York, NY (July 11, 2023) – Film at Lincoln Center announces Todd Haynes’s May December as Opening Night of the 61st New York Film Festival, making its North American premiere at Alice Tully Hall on September 29 with the director and cast in person. Secure your ticket and more with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 19 at noon ET.

In May December, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a popular television star, has arrived in a tight-knit island community in Savannah. Here, she will be doing intimate research for a new part, ingratiating herself into the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she’ll be playing on-screen, and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), to better understand the psychology and circumstances that more than 20 years ago made them notorious tabloid figures. As Elizabeth attempts to get closer to the family, the uncomfortable facts of their scandal unfurl, causing difficult, long-dormant emotions to resurface. From the sensational premise of first time screenwriter Samy Burch’s brilliantly subtle script, director Todd Haynes (Safe, Carol) has constructed an American tale of astonishing richness and depth, which touches the pressure and pleasure points of a culture obsessed equally with celebrity and trauma. It’s a feat of storytelling and pinpoint-precise tone that is shrewd in its wicked embrace of melodrama while also genuinely moving in its humane treatment of tricky subject matter. Boasting a trio of bravura, mercurial performances by Moore, Portman, and Melton, May December is a film about human exploitation, the elusive nature of performance, and the slipperiness of truth that confirms Todd Haynes’s status as one of our consummate movie artists. The film will be released domestically, in theaters November 17 and on Netflix December 1.

The film premiered in competition at Canes in May. There are many reviews. David Rooney's verdict in The Hollywood Reporter was "Always interesting but a bit remote." On a positive note he comments that "What will give the film a significant degree of traction" is "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." Bilge Eberi in Vulture/New York Magazine calls it "a dee[;u uncomfortable movie," that works to "play the audience" like Hitchcock, only like an accordion not a piano.

It's about a famous TV star (Natalie Portman) going to visit a couple in the south. The wife (Julianne Moore) did jail time years ago for raping the man she's now married to (Charles Melton) who then was just out of seventh grade and she was 35, and she had his child in prison. Now Portman's character is going to play Moore's in a movie and wants to "study" her. The film is "very funny and light on its feet," Eberi says, and he found himself "cackling" along with the 2,000 others in the Cannes audience, but when he walked out he felt like he "needed to take a shower."