Provocative Sex Is Back at the Movies. But Are We Ready for It?

When we meet Joe and Gracie and Elizabeth (the film is set in 2015, a couple years before MeToo), most see Joe as Gracie’s victim, but for her purposes, Elizabeth is more concerned with what motivated Gracie’s choice and how the couple see themselves. Gracie, whose outward presentation of white feminine fragility and naïveté enables the control she exerts over her mixed-race family, fiercely resists Elizabeth’s attempts to understand her. Joe, on the other hand, seems to be an open book. As he re-examines his relationship through an outsider’s gaze, long-suppressed questions and dissatisfactions come to the surface.

Like “Saltburn,” sexual desire saturates “May December,” though not always in the ways we expect. In one scene, we see Gracie teaching Elizabeth how to apply her favorite makeup, patting the lipstick onto Elizabeth’s open mouth with her fingertip while the two discuss their mothers. In another, Joe sits alone in front of the TV at night, watching a videotaped face-wash commercial featuring Elizabeth on a loop. As she splashes water on her face, rivulets drip endlessly from her eyelashes and open mouth. The camera zooms in each time before cutting to Joe’s rapt gaze. The interplay of the two images is like a dialogue between lovers — the formation of a relation, or fantasy of a relation, in real time. We can’t know why Joe has chosen this image at this moment, what is going through his mind, but we feel the emergence of a consequential desire that will encourage him to question all the other desires that his life with Gracie has stunted.

Haynes is interested in the way the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves buckle under the weight of retrospection and how central the erotic is to that process. The title gestures toward one of the grand cultural narratives that Gracie and Joe use to understand their relationship. Seen through the eyes of a public that has rejected that narrative, though, Gracie’s attempts to frame their relationship as a meet-cute story are chilling. “You know Joe’s been with more women than I have men,” she tries to explain to Elizabeth at one point. Joe tries to tell Elizabeth the same story, beginning with how different he was from other kids his age. “She saw me,” he says, insisting, “I wanted it.” But the insistence rings false. He is hunky yet has the hunch of an older man mingled with a boy’s soft, awkward bulk — a body in arrested development indicating a static mind.

The film’s score and script collude to resist psychological revelations about the characters. The score combines original compositions and an adapted score from the 1971 period drama “The Go-Between,” laying melodramatic music over scenes that contradict their emotional sway. As the movie introduces us to Gracie and Joe’s family, we peer in on a seemingly normal family anticipating a celebrity’s arrival. Then Gracie opens the fridge door to retrieve wieners for a barbecue. Ominous chords sound, and the score’s effect is bizarre, almost comic. What does Gracie feel here? What are we meant to feel, and what are these feelings’ objects? It’s a moment of misdirection, an analogue for the complex, prickly reticence of Elizabeth and Gracie, two characters who refuse vulnerability and self-revelation at every step, but also for the way that we, as spectators of the sexual lives of others (and sometimes our own) rely on defunct tropes that have nothing to do with our own direct experience. If, upon opening the fridge door in anticipation of Elizabeth’s invasion, Gracie sees herself as the besieged heroine of a romantic melodrama, the score pushes us into feeling that way as well. Eventually the score comes to seem like a tool of manipulation similar to the ones Gracie wields against Joe and Elizabeth.