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I find Todd Haynes movies hard to write about because they're such knotted clusters of themes and ideas. You try to pull on one thread and it lifts the whole wriggling clump. Safe, for instance, was a multihue ombré of sickness and gender and nature and care and protection. It basically rendered me speechless. May December instead tangles together questions about predation and immaturity and acting and voyeurship. It's impossible to talk about without feeling like you're just describing a trivial feature of something larger.
So strange to base a story about predatory research of a child predator on a real case. Here's the real couple in an interview that is lifted for the movie, if you want to compare. And here's the original score from The Go Between. (Haynes listened to it so much during preproduction that he eventually just asked Marcelo Zavros to adapt it.)
I watched May December right after the Henry Fool trilogy, so I accidentally got a not-so-seasonal blast of movies about the post-prison lives of groomers. Happy holidays!
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