Cannes: Netflix picks up Todd Haynes’ ‘May December’, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore

Netflix has acquired Todd Haynes’ Cannes competition entry may decemberwhich impressed on the Croisette, earning a six-minute standing ovation during its Saturday night premiere.

The film stars Natalie Portman as a Hollywood actress who travels to Georgia to investigate the life of Gracie (Julianne Moore, teaming up with Haynes for the fourth time), who has become tabloid fodder after she started a May-December affair with Joe (Charles Melton). of her, a man 23 years her junior. As she prepares for the movie about the couple’s past, Elizabeth watches Gracie and Joe’s wedding 20 years after their relationship became national news, a time when they’re about to become empty nesters.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s review called may december “a complex drama, intrinsically intimate and at the same time detached, at times almost clinical”.

Haynes said DAY that the film’s script came to him “from Natalie and her production team” during the COVID pandemic. “You rarely get scripts that feature such compelling female characters at their core,” she said.

The logline reads: “Twenty years after their infamous tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple caves to the pressure when an actress arrives to research a film about their past.”

The film, which was sold in the United States by CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group, was written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, with a producing team that includes Killer Films’ Christine Vachon and Will Ferrell.

Lee Broda, Alex Brown, Samy Burch, Madeleine Rudin Johnson, Jonathan Montepare, Jeff Rice, Thomas K Richards and Thorsten Schumacher are executive producers. And, along with Vachon and Ferrell, producers include Jessica Elbaum, Grant S. Johnson, Pamela Koffler, Tyler W. Konney, Sophie Mas and Portman.