May December review: Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are tremendous in this daring black comedy

Todd Haynes has directed a film with so many deliciously clashing styles that it’s as much a trashy soap as it is a torrid, probing melodrama

What on earth would make a woman in her mid-thirties have an affair with a teenage boy? This is the question asked in Todd Haynes’s May December, the latest of the filmmaker’s torrid, probing melodramas. It has a plot that could come straight from a prurient TV soap opera, but Haynes – best known for films such as Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015) – comes at his material with an intensity that rekindles memories of some of Ingmar Bergman’s most fraught and closely focused character studies. He also elicits superb performances from his two leads, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a movie star who travels to Savannah, Georgia, to research her new role. In her next film, she is going to play Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who, two decades before, was at the centre of a tabloid scandal after having an affair with a seventh-grader (that’s to say a boy who was 13 years old).

Gracie was arrested when the affair became public. She subsequently divorced her husband and married the boy, Joe (Charles Melton), who is more than 20 years her junior. They’ve since started a family, have children of their own who are college-age, and are now “a beloved part of the community”. However, Elizabeth’s arrival stirs up some very uncomfortable memories, as well as the lingering resentments that surround her.

Portman’s character radiates bad faith. She pretends to be sympathetic toward Gracie when she is really just looking to exploit her. “This is not a story,” Gracie explains at one stage. “It’s my f***ing life.” The Hollywood star interviews everybody she can, from Gracie’s ex-husband, to the son from her first marriage. (“It ruined my life, of course,” the son tells her of his mother’s illicit affair.) Elizabeth begins to dress like Gracie. She mimics everything about her, from her make-up to her way of talking.

Elizabeth is a chameleon-like figure whose true emotions are impossible to read. In one telling scene, she turns up at the school Gracie’s children attend and speaks to the drama class. A student asks her about doing sex scenes on camera. She admits her ambivalence about such scenes. Sometimes she is pretending to enjoy them but, on other occasions, the reverse applies: she is pretending not to enjoy them when she actually does. Moore’s Gracie, meanwhile, combines steeliness and vulnerability. She spends her days exuding cheerfulness and baking cakes that she sells to neighbours – but it doesn’t take very much to reveal her insecurity and her selfishness.

Much of the pleasure of the film lies in its clash of styles. At certain moments, it is trashy and voyeuristic. At others, for example when Elizabeth and Gracie are alone together, it becomes closer to Bergman’s Persona, with its famous shot in which the faces of the actor played by Liv Ullmann and her nurse Bibi Andersson seem to merge. Marcelo Zarvos’s strident musical score adds to the jarring effect.

As the two women shadow each other, Haynes also devotes time to Joe, who is obsessed with caterpillars and butterflies. He is a friendly figure but is stunted emotionally. It’s as if by marrying Gracie so young, he has skipped an entire part of his life and stumbled into middle age prematurely.

It is never quite clear who is exploiting whom. Gracie has presumably invited Elizabeth into her family home because she is being paid for it. There wouldn’t be any other reason for her to rake over such painful memories. She was shamed for her affair with a teenager but tells herself that he was the one who initiated it. Elizabeth is a method actor, so relentlessly devoted to researching her new role that she seems to have lost any sense of compassion or ethical responsibility.

May December is a film without frills or special effects. It’s a closely focused character study, galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore, and delves into areas more conventional dramas wouldn’t dare go near.

Dir: Todd Haynes. Starring: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Gabriel Chung, Elizabeth Yu, Piper Curda. 15, 113 minutes.

‘May December’ is in cinemas from 17 November, and is released on Sky Cinema on 8 December