Director Todd Haynes presented 'Secrets of a Sc--dal' at the San Sebastián Festival, in which he deconstructs the traditional television film to give it a series of layers on the verge of delirium.
Todd Haynes became known in the early nineties with Poison and became one of the spearheads of American queer cinema. From that moment on he became a cult director and developed a career in which he poured all his artistic interests, as eclectic as they were disruptive. From the everyday paranoia of Safe to the glam delirium of Velvet Goldmine, passing through his reinterpretation of Douglas Sirk in Far from Heaven, his deconstructed biopic about Bob Dylan in I'm Not There or that masterpiece that remains Carol.
After the documentary about The Velvet Underground, because music has always been one of his passions, he returns to fiction with a film as atypical as what is usually expected of him. May December, or as it will be called in our country, Secrets of a Sc--dal, part of a real case, that of a 36-year-old woman who had s---al relations with a 13-year-old minor and was convicted of abuse. She became pregnant and the two subsequently married and lived together. That is, the reverse of Lolita, something that was also present in the recent Lumen Vladimir Award, by the Argentine Leticia Martin.
Between Bergman, Chabrol and Almodóvar
The director collects this material to take it to his field, that of masks, mirrors and fractured identities. Thus, an actress will access the private environment of the woman who has established her life after the sc--dal to make a film about her case. They are Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore (Haynes's fetish actress from Safe to Far from Heaven) and a relationship will be established between them as tense and strange as it is morbid and ultra-toxic.
The battery of references is extensive. In a meeting with Todd Haynes, he shows Infobae Spain the filming notebook to outline the style of the film in which we find everything from Persona by Ingmar Bergman to The Graduate, through An Unfaithful Woman, by Claude Chabrol, from which he especially draws. But also that tone of demolition that Brian de Palma and Roman Polanski practiced so well in some of their works, although in this case doing an exercise in self-awareness when assimilating some of the postulates of the television film to turn it into a deeply deconstructed exhibition. authorial in which the most camp satire beats.
Secrets of a Sc--dal is an example of Todd Haynes' mastery when it comes to playing with styles and subverting the terms of high culture. Its disruptive soundtrack, which creates an entire atmosphere, is taken from the music of Michel Legran and is responsible for giving a sarcastic impact to an entire style exercise that exceeds any expectation, because it is free, playful, unprejudiced and very brave in the times. accommodators who run. An important work about appearances and the absurd world of sensationalism in which we live.
