Two Major New Movies Take on Age-Gap Romances. It’s Striking to Look at Them Together.

A good deal of the first half of Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla circles around the question of when Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), only 14 when she first met the 24-year-old Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), will finally convince the troubled megastar to consummate their relationship. In recurring scenes in Elvis’ grand but gloomy Graceland bedroom (by which point, according to the movie’s imprecise representation of the passage of time, Priscilla is around 16), she attempts to move from kissing to something more and is stayed by the hand of the King. The reasons he gives for this deferral keep changing. At first he contends she’s too young, an observation to which many in the audience may respond to with a silent “Ya think?” When she persists after what seems like the passage of at least another school year, he puts her off again: “I’ll know when the time is right.”

Later still, during a period when Elvis becomes obsessed with Eastern and Christian spiritual teachings, he rejects Priscilla’s advances by saying that they must rise above the desires of the flesh. And after the two are married and Priscilla has given birth to their child Lisa Marie, Elvis expresses reluctance to harm his wife by having sex with her, even though she tells him she feels physically fine. Since all of these events have by that point led to an actual baby, clearly the two have become sexual partners somewhere along the way. But in an act of directorial elision that could be seen either as respectfully privacy-preserving or maddeningly vague, Coppola never indicates to the viewer exactly when and where this long-awaited consummation occurs.

On first viewing, I presumed that a montage that comes just after Priscilla’s high school graduation was meant to imply that the moment had arrived: Outside the closed door of that same Graceland bedroom, an unseen servant puts down and then takes away a series of meals on trays. Inside, the viewer imagines, the long-chaste couple must finally be taking their physical intimacy to the next level. But a montage that immediately follows, of Priscilla and Elvis taking photos of each other in a series of costumes (he peers out from under a slouchy hat, she brandishes a feather duster as a miniskirted French maid), suggests that they may have spent those days of bedroom lockdown engaged in the kind of quasi-sexual play Elvis referred to earlier in the film when he assured his frustrated sweetheart that their abstinence doesn’t mean they can’t do “other things.” And a few scenes later, when he presents her with a diamond engagement ring humongous enough to suit his flamboyant personal style, Elvis tells his bride-to-be, “I told you I’d know when the time was right,” suggesting that the two waited until they were married to finally have sex, as was my takeaway after a second viewing and a conversation about the film. (This reading also matches the real Priscilla’s account: She has long maintained that the two didn’t have sex until their wedding night.)

If it seems like I’m unusually fixated on ascertaining the truth about the exact nature of the sexual relationship between an adult and an underage partner, I’m hardly alone in my interest. Two movies coming out this fall, Priscilla and Todd Haynes’ May December, focus on long-term partnerships built around a significant age gap, with the younger member of the couple barely in their early teens when the courtship begins. To differing degrees, both films are based on true stories: Priscilla is adapted from the memoir Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, who also worked closely with both Coppola and Spaeny to develop the project. May December is a much looser fictionalization of a real-life tabloid story, the Mary Kay LeTourneau scandal, in which a 34-year-old schoolteacher served prison time for second-degree rape after having sex with her 12-year-old student—a student she later married.

In Haynes’ reimagining of the story, the older woman in the couple is not a teacher but a pet-shop employee, and the younger man—or boy, at the time of their first encounter—is not her student but a local kid who comes in to help around the store. The movie takes place, with no flashbacks, two decades later, after Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) and Joe Yoo (Riverdale star Charles Melton) have been married long enough to have a child in college and twins about to graduate high school. They have long ago gotten past the humiliating national scandal (and multiple bouts of prison time for Gracie) that marred the start of what both insist is a now perfectly ordinary picket-fence marriage. Or so they would have everyone believe—most especially Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), an A-list movie star who has come to spend time with the family in their comfortable suburban enclave of Savannah, Georgia. Elizabeth’s intent is to observe the couple’s interactions in preparation for playing the younger Gracie in an upcoming film, a prestige adaptation that, it’s implied, will try to do better justice to the Atherton-Yoos’ story than a tawdry TV production made years before.

Just as Coppola did, Haynes—never before a filmmaker to shy away from frank depictions of sex—chooses to treat the foundational scene of the Atherton-Yoos’ relationship, a seduction in the back storage room of that 1990s-era pet shop, as a kind of forbidden image, unrepresented except in a late scene where we briefly see Elizabeth, in character as Gracie, re-create a few moments of it on a crowded film set. During many faux-candid conversations between the onetime sex offender and the studiedly nonjudgmental actress, Gracie—played by Moore as a cagey but also strikingly immature woman, a baby-voiced little girl who’s pushing 60—steers around Elizabeth’s attempts to elicit memories of that first encounter and its aftermath.

Within the confines of Joe and Gracie’s marriage, the taboo around remembering the origin of their love story is even more strictly enforced. The audience first meets Joe at the same moment Portman’s Elizabeth does, as Gracie hands him a carefully wrapped box of literal shit to dispose of. It’s one of the pieces of hate mail the couple still periodically receives, even all these years after the initial rush of media attention made them the target of widespread harassment. Both Gracie and Joe treat this unpleasant parcel as a matter to be casually, even laughingly dismissed. But as the movie proceeds, it grows clearer that Joe, for one, has yet to work through the more metaphorical shit left over from his years as a teenage father pursued by paparazzi. The now-thirtysomething Joe, played by Melton as a taciturn but endlessly patient husband and a devoted if overly enmeshed dad, eventually emerges as the movie’s most damaged, complex, and morally struggling character. This is a man whose whole identity is founded on believing the myth that his seduction by a grown woman when he was just 13 was not only not an act of violence, but a transformative experience of lasting and passionate love.

Priscilla and May December couldn’t be more different in tone. Coppola’s film, like her artless heroine, is simple and sincere to the point of diaphanousness, while Haynes’, like the harder-to-love Gracie, is tricky and at times untrustworthy in its relationship to the viewer. Even the camera and the soundtrack at times seem on a mission to fake us out. One early scene features a soap opera–style crash zoom into a close-up on Gracie’s face, accompanied by a music cue straight out of old-school melodrama (in fact, the swelling piano score is adapted by Marcelo Zarvos from Michel Legrand’s music for the 1971 romance The Go-Between). The occasion for this histrionic confluence of visuals and sound? Gracie’s announcement that, in advance of a planned family barbecue, “we’re not gonna have enough hot dogs.”

May December is among Haynes’ funniest films, though its humor is nearly always in the service of producing discomfort and alienation in the characters, the audience, or both, all of which makes it also one of his cruelest. Between Gracie’s flair for self-dramatization—one of her later meltdowns will involve the tragedy of a coconut layer cake gone to waste—and the visiting actress’s vulturelike fixation on plundering the Atherton-Yoos’ lives for material, the movie shows little concern with making its main characters people to like or to root for. Late in the movie, as the stolid, stunted Joe begins to take his first hesitant steps toward introspection and self-discovery, May December assumes a slightly warmer and more humanistic tone. But it ends on a note of distinct chilliness, with the aforementioned scene on a movie set that shows Portman’s perfectionistic actress struggling to re-create that pivotal come-on at that pet store long ago. It’s that decision of Haynes’—to cloak the crucial scene of adult-child seduction in multiple layers of irony, distance, and meta-narration, finally revealing it only in an imperfect re-creation that implicates the audience as voyeurs—that makes May December, for me, a more complex and more successful study of the trauma left behind by adult-child relationships like Gracie and Joe’s, or Elvis and Priscilla’s. Coppola, too, uses indirection and deferral to dance around the taboo scene of an adult and a child in bed together, but her purpose in doing so is less clear. Does her extreme restraint demonstrate a tasteful resistance to prurient leering, or does it, intentionally or no, serve to gloss over the moral distastefulness of whatever is happening behind that closed bedroom door?

Priscilla has been praised for its shift of focus from the already overexposed figure of Elvis to the long-overlooked experience of his neglected child bride. And there is something admirable about the film’s refusal to editorialize or wag a disapproving finger, instead letting Spaeny’s and Elordi’s quiet, vulnerable performances show a real, if toxic, connection between a damaged man and the young girl to whom he passes on that damage. But in eliding the precise timeline of the physical relationship between Elvis and Priscilla, and the reality of what that relationship was ultimately like, Coppola’s film seems to me to deprive its heroine of the very selfhood the movie seeks to return to her, leaving her instead in a kind of disembodied suspension. Haynes’ very different choice in May December is to make the lead couple’s long-ago encounter accessible only through a process of reenactment that inevitably distorts the truth. This framing puts the viewer in the position of being complicit both with Portman’s coldly ambitious actress and with the snooping paparazzi of years gone by. It’s an uncomfortable place to occupy, but as a treatment of such an uncomfortable issue, it also strikes me as more honest than Priscilla’s gauzy equivocation.