One great thing about the Awards Season ritual is that it sets aside a commercially viable space for traditional melodramas, which have otherwise been banished to the depths of Lifetime & Hallmark television broadcasts.  The only way you can still attract a sizeable audience to the grandly emotional domestic dramas Hollywood used to routinely market as “women’s pictures” is to save them for Oscar-qualifying runs in the last month of the year, when interviews with their stars are suddenly headline worthy news items instead of background promotional noise.  In general, that’s all the Oscars are good for anyway: clearing out a little space in the calendar for wide audiences to discuss & celebrate movies outside the usual big-ticket tentpole IP.  Few genres benefit more from that space than the emotional-breakdown acting showcases and lavish period pieces that are traditionally marketed to women, though, if not only for their value as easy filler for Best Actress and Best Costume Design awards ballots.  It’s the most blubbering time of the year, and I’m always in need of a good cry.

If there’s any working director who understands the artistic value of the woman’s picture, it’s surely Todd Haynes, who was effectively anointed this generation’s Douglas Sirk after his period-piece melodramas Carol & Far from Heaven.  Haynes worked his way back into Awards Consideration this year with May December, a film that purposefully, perversely plays with the hallmarks of modern melodrama in the director’s signature style.  The film stars Natalie Portman as a method actor studying the quirks & mannerisms of the real-life tabloid headliner who inspired her latest role, played by longtime Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore.  Moore plays a notorious Movie-of-the-Week topic due to the sordid formation of her family, which started in the 90s when she had an affair with a 7th grader, birthed his twin children behind bars, and then married him after prison to cover up the abuse with the cultural fix-all of good old fashioned family values.  Portman promises to give Moore’s . . . unique family history the thoughtful, empathetic representation onscreen that was missing from its earlier, trashier depictions, but in the process of studying her subject, she uncovers ugly, festering truths just beneath the peachy family surface: Moore’s continued abuses of manipulative power, the young husband’s stunted emotional development in the years since the crime (played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Charles Melton), and her own twisted attraction to the role. 

If there’s anything surprising about May December‘s stature as a serious Awards Contender, it’s that Haynes tells its story through disposable TV Movie aesthetics.  Usually when a great directors’ film festival darling gets sidelined on Netflix it’s disappointing; this time it’s darkly funny.  Haynes calls attention to the heightened melodrama of the piece by ironically deploying soap opera music stings over minor, everyday domestic concerns, the same way Moore’s character violently sobs every time she overbakes a cake or forgets to buy enough hotdogs for a family cookout.  The director is at his most prankish here, riffing on the real-life tabloid story of child rapist Mary Kay Letourneau in a parody of Movie-of-the-Week melodrama, revealing the bizarre details as Portman does research by literally flipping through a tabloid.  He takes the emotional pain of the story seriously, though, the same way his Barbie-doll retelling of Karen Carpenter’s tragic life’s story in Superstar is far more dramatically severe in practice than its tongue-in-cheek presentation sounds in the abstract.  The hazy soap opera filters, icy camp performances, and throwaway jokes about dwindling hotdog supplies set May December up to be a perverse laugh riot, but Haynes’s love for melodrama is too sincere for things to devolve that way.  It’s the same effect as ironic audiences settling in to laugh at the “No more wire hangers!” histrionics of Mommie Dearest, only to be confronted by the film’s non-stop onslaught of genuinely upsetting domestic abuses.

As much as I appreciate Todd Haynes’s unique brand of weaponized irony, I can’t say that May December is my favorite melodrama that screened for critics this Awards Season.  That honor belongs to the culinary period piece The Pot-au-Feu, which will eventually be released in the United States as The Taste of Things.  The film is a romantically penned love letter to Juliette Binoche, just as every Todd Haynes film is a loving tribute to Julianne Moore.  Binoche stars as the most underappreciated chef in 19th Century France, doing all of the complex, hands-on kitchen work that gets the master of her house recognized as “The Napoleon of Gastronomy.”  That restaurateur (Benoît Magimel) acknowledges her value as a culinary artist, at least, and he spends every minute they’re not cooking together begging for her hand in marriage.  Binoche prefers to let her cooking do the talking and expresses her mutual adoration for her employer through the beauty & poetry of her food.  Only he and a small social club of nerdy gourmets (essentially, the world’s first foodie podcast) truly understand her value in the field, but the audience is invited to share in their awe.  The emotions in the household get exponentially bigger as the two chefs’ mutual yearning starts to border on ritualistic kink, and it all eventually boils over into a fiery romance with no safety valve.  Love, life, and tragedy inevitably ensue.

The Taste of Things is an aggressively sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals – very likely the best film about food since Pig.  Its honeyed tone & lighting are absurdly cozy & warm, with handheld camerawork that takes the term “food porn” as literally as it can without indulging in sploshing.  Still, the big emotions of its central tearjerker romance place it just as firmly in the melodrama category as Haynes’s latest, which is much colder & more detached.  Both are great Wine Mom movies, but only May December plays into that genre with ironic, Lifetime-parodying self-awareness, while The Taste of Things is achingly sincere & straightforward in its full-hearted commitment to melodrama.  Maybe that commitment makes it more mawkish & cliche, but it also makes it more emotionally satisfying when it violently yanks your heartstrings the way only the best women’s pictures can.

-Brandon Ledet