'The expectations are different for you all the time'

A scandalous age-gap relationship plays out at the centre of ‘May December’ which debuted recently at the Cannes Film Festival. In the starry romantic drama directed by Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore plays December to Charles Melton’s much younger May, whose character was just 13 when the two fell in love, reported ‘Variety’.

“It’s a complicated dynamic,” Moore admitted because of the time in their lives when they first met.

“An age gap is one thing, but a relationship between an adult and a child is a different thing entirely,” Moore said at a recent press conference for ‘May December’ which was embraced in the Grand Palais with an enthusiastic six-minute standing ovation.

“When is age inappropriate? It’s when people are in different places developmentally and someone is not an adult. This is why we have boundaries around that,” she said, quoted by ‘Variety’. “The reason why this movie feels so dangerous watching it’s because people don’t know where anyone’s boundaries are. It feels scary.”

In ‘May December’, Natalie Portman plays an actress who travels to Maine to study the life of Moore’s character, whom she’s set to play in a film.

Portman describes the film as a study of ‘the different roles we play in different environments’. She observed that discrepancy is particularly on display at the Cannes Film Festival, where women are mandated to wear heels on the red carpet.

“Even here, the different ways we, as women, are expected to behave at this festival even compared to men and how we’re supposed to look and carry ourselves,” she said.

She added, “The expectations are different for you all the time. It affects how you behave, whether you are buying into or rejecting it. You’re defined by the social structures upon you.”