NOTES ON A SCANDAL (MAY DECEMBER)

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Todd Haynes' 'May December' isn't the first film to tackle the fallout from an older woman having a affair with an underage boy.

However it might be the first to look at the impact of it years later.

Starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, the film imagines what would be life if indie filmmakers tried to turn a real life underage sex scandal into a movie.

Specifically Portman's actress Elizabeth Berry arrives in Savannah, Georgia to research the story of Julianne Moore's Gracie Atherton-Yoo.

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Arriving at the family's house by the sea, she attends a barbecue Gracie and her husband, Charles Melton's Joe Yoo are throwing for family and friends.

Within minutes of them greeting her, a package arrives at the house which Gracie immediately senses contains human faeces.

The couple dispose of it, with Gracie nonchalantly explaining this happens from time to time, although it's been a while since it last occurred.

Elizabeth, the star of a popular TV drama about a vet, is shocked but this incident sets the tone for a film that is prepared to go to a lot of uncomfortable places - often quite subtly.

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During the barbecue, Elizabeth observes Gracie and Joe who is 23 years her junior and was 13 when the two of them were discovered having sex in the storeroom of a pet store she was working in in 1992.

A married woman, Gracie was immediately caught in the eye of a tabloid media storm and was jailed, having Joe's child.

Now married to Gracie, Joe is the age she was when they embarked on the affair.

Both are about to become empty nesters, with one daughter, Piper Curda's Honor graduating from university and their twins, Elizabeth Yu's Mary and Gabriel Chung's Charlie due to go to college.

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Gracie is very accommodating as Elizabeth goes about her research - taking her to flower arranging classes, inviting her to dinner in the family home and showing her how she bakes.

However as Elizabeth digs deeper into the media storm around the couple, interviewing Gracie's first husband DW Moffett's Tom and son from that marriage, Cory Michael Smith's Georgie, there's a sense she is much more ruthless and self-serving than was first apparent.

A visit by her to the storeroom where Joe and Gracie were caught feels prurient.

And as Haynes' clever film unfolds, there's a feeling that Elizabeth is leeching off the pain that still lingers in the Yoo family and has little regard for people whose life experience she's going to depict onscreen.

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Working from a screenplay by Samy Burch, 'May December' is modelled on the real life case of a teacher in Washington state, Mary Kay Letourneau who was jailed for second degree rape of a child after having an affair with one of her sixth graders, Vili Fualaau who was 12 at the time.

Like Gracie, she became pregnant and ended up marrying her pupil nine years later.

The question Haynes' film initially poses is: what would lead a 36 year old woman in his feature to embark on an extramarital affair with a 13 year old boy?

However as the film progresses, Haynes and Burch turn the question back on the audience and ask: why would we still be fascinated 23 years later with the story of a 36 year old woman who had an affair with a 13 year old boy and married him?

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It's a disturbing question, designed to make audience members shift uncomfortably in their seats.

Whilst Gracie is regarded in the public eye by many as something of a scarlet woman, Haynes, Burch and Moore portray her as much more complex character than the tabloid image of her.

Gracie can be vulnerable, brittle, trusting and graceful.

There are suggestions that she's privileged but also pitied.

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Haynes and Burch hint that the cake business she runs isn't a spectacular success but is supported by friends who feel bad for her.

If anything of the two, Elizabeth is the more sinister character.

She can be two-faced, sly and is eager to ruthlessly exploit the Yoo family's pain and she's not afraid to disturb the dynamics between Joe and Gracie.

It's a complex movie fascinated by the fronts people adopt to hide their true selves.

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One minute Gracie is steely and calm.

The next she is sobbing on her own in a bedroom or exhibiting controlling behaviour around her children - winding them up by making passive aggressive comments in front of Elizabeth about her daughter's arms or son's calcium deficiency.

Joe appears placid for much of the film but as 'May December' unfolds, the axis shifts and we realise in the final act how much he is struggling with Elizabeth's arrival andthe hornet's nest she is stirring.

Elizabeth exudes sympathy for the couple but her conversations with Tom, Georgie and the filmmakers reveal she is anything but.

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Occasionally the mask slips, with Joe admonishing her for referring to their life as a story and Gracie also making the same point forcefully in the film.

However she comes from a profession, acting which is all about fronts.

True identity is cloaked by actors while assuming a character's traits.

In the case of Elizabeth, neither Haynes' audience nor, we suspect, the actress herself are exactly sure where the lines that distinguish her true self from her fictional portrayal of others really lie.

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Haynes, Burch and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt brilliantly focus on the prurient nature of Elizabeth's work.

At one point, Blauvelt's camera creeps behind the shelves of the pet store as she probes the owner about the events that took place there.

A scene where Gracie and Elizabeth watch Mary trying on a high school graduation dress in a shop is also terrifically framed by mirrors which capture the two women's reactions but raise questions about image and reality.

Later the camera becomes an actual mirror, with Elizabeth and Gracie staring directly into it while applying makeup - another act of masking their true selves to project a certain image.

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Joe cuts a lonely figure in the film, raising Monarch butterflies as a hobby.

This only serves to underscore the boyishness that still exists in a 36 year old man and a sense that the tumultuous events he experienced prevented him from fully developing into the person he could have been.

The performances Haynes extracts from his cast are superb.

Moore and Portman embrace their characters' many contradictions and fit perfectly together.

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Their scenes together crackle with real tension and you keep waiting for an eruption of anger.

Melton is a revelation, gradually peeling away Joe's apparent composure to reveal he is anything but.

Cory Michael Smith is terrific too as Georgie who is clearly damaged by the scandal that split his family.

He's also vain and opportunistic.

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The lead singer of a rather mediocre band, there's a wonderful moment when he gauchely tries to pitch to Elizabeth being appointed as a music consultant to the film.

Moffett, Yu, Chung and Curda impress, while Lawrence Arancio memorably turns up as Gracie's attorney Morris Sperber to help fill in her back story.

After the sombre tones of his impressively dark 2019 environmental legal drama 'Dark Waters,' 'May December' feels like a return to Haynes' penchant for Douglas Sirk style female led melodramas.

While it is not as highly stylised as 'Far From Heaven' (his previous collaboration with Moore) or 'Carol,' it boasts an overwrought score by the Brazilian composer Marcelo Zarvas that reworks Michel Legrand's music for Joseph Losey's 1971 movie 'The Go Between'.

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In true melodramatic fashion, the music swells at key emotional moments of the film.

Rather than proving grating, it somehow all works.

There's also an Ingmar Bergman like quality to 'May December' as well, with its intimate character studies and sense that Elizabeth is like a vampire feeding off Grace's misery a la 'Persona'.

'May December' is the work of a director who's really on top of his game.

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It's smart. It's complex. It's challenging and, at times, darkly comic.

It's a mature work of cinema that doesn't follow convention and it isn't afraid to dig beneath the surface and rattle the foundations of the picket fence community it depicts.

A refreshing movie, it deserves to be in the heel of the hunt for Oscar glory.

Whether Academy voters are prepared to reward such a daring film will say an awful lot about Hollywood's awards season.

('May December' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on November 27, 2023 and was made available for streaming on Netflix in the US and Canada on December 1, 2023 and on Sky Cinema and NowTV on the UK and Ireland on December 8, 2023)