NZIFF: May December

Natalie Portman shadows Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes’ salaciously entertaining metafictional psychodrama about an actress researching for a role in a film about a tabloid sex scandal.

In Todd Haynes’s dark comedy... Julianne Moore plays Gracie Atherton-Yoo, a former pet-store worker whose affair with an adolescent boy, Joe, created a media frenzy in her middle-class community in Savannah, Georgia. The story begins more than two decades after the scandal, as a film is to be made about Gracie and Joe, who are now married with a baby that Gracie had in prison.

Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, the actress who’s to portray the younger Gracie. Elizabeth arrives at Gracie’s family home to shadow her daily life, to observe and imitate her subject’s gestures, but also, increasingly, to probe the murkier depths of her affair and psyche—a near impossible task.

Fiction and fact, self-delusion and self-truth find a dangerous edge in May December, a film constantly crossing the lines of what is ‘moral’ in order to resolutely prod at media—and cinema’s—complicity in feeding the machinery of lies.