apple tvIn Apple TV+’s latest star drama, the Oscar winner plays a famous journalist who is blackmailed by a vindictive man over a self-published novel. Intelligent and beautifully photographed.
Some of Alfonso Cuaron’s most brilliant films include: human childrenhe trusts his audience to follow his lead, but the story path winds. That approach is reflected in Disclaimer, a perverse series that explores the timeless yet ever more timely subject of fiction and reality. Cate Blanchett plays the charming role of Katherine Ravenscroft, a famous investigative journalist who is anonymously sent a novel about an undeniably scandalous person. The disclaimer has nothing new to say about how our imaginations fill in the blanks of reality, but Cuaron and Blanchett make this series an engrossing, intellectual romp.
Cuaron wrote and directed all seven episodes, which is a slow pace from Renee Knight’s 2015 novel on which it is based. The story flashes back and forth in time, at first with deliberate confusion, then gradually filling in details. We see a young couple having sex on a train while traveling in Europe, but we don’t know who it is yet. We soon meet a retired London teacher with the suitably loud name Stephen Brigstock, played with a devilish grin by Kevin Kline. Stephen has just discovered a novel written by his late wife. Realizing that Catherine was among them, he self-published the book under a pseudonym and mailed it to her. At that time, the disclaimer usually found in fiction was changed to the following: do not have It’s a coincidence.”
Catherine isn’t the most difficult role Blanchett has ever played, but she’s very convincing as always, and Catherine’s anguish is felt every time the screws are turned from Stephen, who threatens to ruin her life. is accelerating. He blames her for the tragedy that touched him and follows up by sending her a photo even more explosive than the novel in order to take revenge. Blanchett navigates the performance beautifully. Katherine becomes increasingly frantic, but we continue to sympathize with her despair, no matter how badly she may or may not have acted all those years ago.
Klein plays Stephen with great precision. He is filled with sadness for his wife, who died nine years ago, and wanders around wearing her worn-out pink cardigan. However, he also has a mean attitude towards his former students. As his plan progresses, we see him pretending to be a pathetic old man when it suits him, only to turn his back and give up the game with a sly grin. Stephen becomes accused, but Klein remains intrigued. Kodi Smit-McPhee is touching as Catherine’s aimless and hapless son. A miscast Sacha Baron Cohen plays her husband, Robert, wearing an incredibly bad wig. His stilted acting makes Robert a more gullible fool than he should be.
The first section of the series describes plans for revenge and Catherine’s efforts to find and silence Stephen. Most of the middle part is devoted to flashbacks, many of which take place in Italy. Great cinematographers Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel create a gauzy, seductive look there, but they make even the rainiest of London days shine.
Lesley Manville gives a heartbreaking performance as Nancy, Stephen’s wife who falls into a permanent depression following the death of her teenage son Jonathan (Louis Partridge). In other flashbacks, scenes from Nancy’s novel are played out, with Leila George playing young Catherine. That middle section is also the sexy part of the show, reminding us that Cuaron has always been a master of simmering eroticism. Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001). Here he sultries in his words and gaze. But Cuaron’s story becomes even more tantalizing as Nancy cannot have witnessed everything she put into the novel.
In the voiceover, we often hear Stephen explain his plans, and the first-person narration works because it seems like he’s talking to us, making us complicit in his plans. But the alternating narration from Katherine’s perspective, where a disembodied voice (Indira Varma) calls her “you”, is just annoying. When Catherine, distraught after reading the novel, looks in the mirror, she hears, “You’ve seen this face before. You never wanted to see it again. Your mask has fallen.” . Blanchett lets us know what Katherine is feeling. There is no need to explain her thoughts.
In both fiction and reality, narrators are unreliable and memories are subjective. Why some characters in the disclaimer take so long to figure out is a bit of a head-scratcher. But that hardly matters, as Cuaron guides us through this ever-interesting maze of possibilities.
Disclaimer is now available on Apple TV+ worldwide
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
