Secrets of a scandal: an excellent melodrama of mirrors and lies (****) | EUROtoday

The secret of melodrama is the mirror. And a director like him is aware of it properly. Todd Haynes so completely obsessive about Douglas Sirk (the director of melodramas and mirrors) to the purpose of daring, as he dared, to compose in Far from the sky (2002) a mirror of the traditional Sirkian Heaven solely is aware of (1955). Secrets of a scandal (outlandish title the place there may be one to translate May December) is a mirror from starting to finish; a mirror of itself. And a mirror of cinema and even life. That's proper, a mirror so completely polished, stark and voracious that it cuts.

The story of an actress is advised (Natalie Portman) who goes to a girl's home (Julianne Moore) to be taught to be her; to mimic her. What the primary needs is for the second to indicate her the position in her subsequent movie which, appropriately based mostly on actual occasions, is nothing greater than another person's personal life. 20 years in the past, when Moore's character was 35, she turned fodder for all of the scandals by seducing a 13-year-old boy, a boy who ended up turning into her husband and father of three youngsters who at the moment are youngsters. What follows is the punctual description of a collective catastrophe the place everybody, completely everybody, does nothing apart from stay a deferred life, an imposted life, a life that, as Sirk would say, is nothing apart from, as soon as once more, a Imitation of life.

Haynes, along with his normal knowledge, makes use of at instances (in just a bit a couple of scene) the language of the filthiest TV film to construct from there a cultured, cold, disturbing and exhaustingly complicated parable (in one of the best of the senses) about manipulation. , the traces of kid abuse, immaturity, the merciless lie of romantic love, absolutely the lack of scruples of the media… The digicam strikes inside and outside fully misplaced characters who by no means fairly know. whether or not what they expertise is actual, fiction or the reflection of a actuality distantly tailored by fiction. Mirrors and labyrinths, actually, have rather a lot in frequent.

In this fashion, the movie works with the unusual and disastrous mechanism of a time bomb the place nothing is strictly what it appears. Or, quite the opposite, every thing aspires to be neatly its most banal look. Everything appears one second away from exploding. Everyone is mirrored in every thing. All mirrors lie. What looks like a movie centered on denouncing a flagrant case of abuse finally ends up being an ideal x-ray of us. In impact, we mentioned, all the movie is a wonderfully polished, stark and voracious mirror. And it makes blood.

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Direccin: Todd Haynes. Interpreters: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith. Duracin: 113 minutes. Nationality: USA.