Day: May 28, 2023

It’s Sunday evening (6:15 pm), the sun won’t slip into dusk for another three hours (during the warm months night doesn’t really begin in Paris until 10 pm), and for the first time in nearly two weeks I’m finally feeling relaxed and settled down. Breathing easy.

A couple of hours ago I took my first late-afternoon nap since…I don’t know, May 10th or something. It’s amazing what a decent snooze can do for your disposition. The whole city feels casual and chill. Everyone is sharing the same dreamy mood. Blue sky, gentle sunshine, not too hot.

After nearly two weeks of mostly Cannes-generated stress, deadline pressures, way too little sleep (i.e., the snore bear), waiting in line after line for the next Salle Debussy film and regarding the usual suspects askance, feelings of serenity are finally within. Not for long but at least tonight feels right.

Alas, it all starts again late tomorrow afternoon with my 7:15 pm flight to Newark. God protect me from being seated next to a Jabba.

In Todd Haynes May December, which I saw in Cannes a few days ago, Julianne Moore is Gracie Atherton, a 60ish native of Savannah (actually Tybee Island, a bucolic waterfront community 25 minutes to the east). She services the affluent locals with a dessert-baking business, and is living fairly flush or at least comfortably.

Gracie owns (rents?) an elegant multi-bedroom home, and apparently three nearly grown kids (a lad and — I think — two lassies), and they’re all in college or about to attend same. Not to mention their 36-year-old father, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), whom Gracie married after seducing him at age 13 when they were both working in a pet store.

Like the real-life (and now deceased) Mary Kay Letourneau, Gracie’s misdeed led to a prison term for statutory rape, but that was 23 years ago and life has since settled down. Joe presumably handles the delivery of the cakes, pies and pastries.

As I explained on 5.21, May December is about a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), visiting the Tybee homestead in order to research a forthcoming Gracie portrayal in a film about her once-turbulent life.

I was undergoing some turbulence of my own due to a nagging question: how is Gracie affording all this (pricey abode, college tuition)?

Maybe there was a line about inherited wealth that I missed, but if Gracie comes from a rich family why was she working in a pet store in her 30s?

And how much, really, could she be earning from making fancy birthday cakes and whatnot? Gracie is presumably catering to elites but even if she’s charging double Savannah pastry chefs earn less than $20 per hour, according to Google.

Did she raise money for the house through crowd-funding? Did she get into Bitcoin? Did she write a successful book about her thing with Joe? These questions may have been answered in the film, and okay, it’s quite possible I might have missed some info due to zoning out from boredom.

I only know that (a) wealthy filmmakers tend to write or otherwise create characters whose lives tend to reflect their own comfort levels, and (b) too much financial ease or abundance is alienating from a Joe Popcorn perspective.

Previously noted: Letourneau and Fualaau insisted from the get-go that their relationship was consensual; ditto Gracie and Joe in May December. After serving her prison term Letourneau married Fualaau and, like their screen counterparts, had kids with him.