![]() ![]() ![]() Those are almost invariably nods to similar shots in Fassbinder melodramas where he separates protagonists who are put into a fraught situation with the mores of the culture. I know exactly what you’re talking about - that tableau, it’s in Velvet Goldmine, it’s in Poison, it’s in Far From Heaven. You’ve also got a lot of scenes where people are gawking at someone because they’re famous. I noticed something rewatching your films: You’ve shot a lot of scenes of disapproving townspeople gawking at the protagonist for doing something transgressive. It soon becomes clear that the intrusion of this glamorous outsider could change Joe’s life even more than his wife’s, forcing him to question what he had learned to accept - but in classic Haynes style, that’s no guarantee he’ll break free. Instead, we watch while she and Elizabeth circle each other, facing off Persona style. The film, inspired by the real-life coupling of teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and her student Vili Fualaau, refuses to make a ruling on Gracie’s choices. Now that boy is a man ( Charles Melton), and he and Gracie are still together and raising their own nearly grown children. May December follows a famous actress named Elizabeth ( Natalie Portman) who travels to Tybee Island, Georgia, to meet the notorious woman she’s about to play in a biopic: Gracie ( Julianne Moore), who filled the tabloids more than two decades ago after she seduced, and got pregnant by, a middle-school boy named Joe. Even now, his films are full of visual and narrative references to the classics he can’t stop thinking about - including May December, his latest, which opens the New York Film Festival on September 29. He remembers his early urge to recreate movies like Mary Poppins as one that sizzled through his hands and through his body. He studied film and semiotics at Brown, then spent about a decade and a half in New York before finally shipping out to Portland, Oregon, in 2000, where he’s stayed ever since, in part because it means he can hang out with friends like fellow filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. suburbs, a multitalented kid who was fascinated by hippie girls, tight with his sister and his female friends, and super into drawing and painting and trying to remake the movies he saw in the theaters using his Super 8. ![]() What if freedom weren’t about knowing who you really are, but about knowing you could change at any time? What if you cast six different actors as Bob Dylan, including a young Black boy and a 30-something Australian woman? (It would still feel less radical than Haynes’s casting of Superstar, a film about the life and tragic death of Karen Carpenter that’s “acted” entirely by Barbies.) In his best films - the thwarted lust and romance of Poison, Far From Heaven, and Carol the suburban rot of Safe - it’s both.Īt the opposite end are his rock-star movies, which use the self-creation of performers as an aspirational motif. Other times, they fear society’s judgment. (Like Safe’s shrinking protagonist, Carol White, when asked to give a speech: “I’m trying to see myself, hopefully, more as I am, more, um, more positive, like seeing the pluses?”) Sometimes the web they’re stuck in is one they have spun themselves, a filigree of delusion and self-protective lies. The filmmaker, who is hyperarticulate and prolific, has spent much of his career making work about people who struggle to express even the most basic emotional needs.
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