Disclaimer
(series, seven episodes)
United Kingdom/USA, 2024. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, Indira Varma, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Running time 343′
Before the pandemic, in 2018, the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 75th Venice International Film Festival had gone to his very own Roma (later distributed on Netflix), but this time Alfonso Cuarón will not compete – after Y tu mamá también in 2001 and The Children of Men in 2006 (in 2013 Gravity was ‘only’ the opening film of the 70th edition) – and he will not present a movie. Disclaimer – The Perfect Life is, in fact, a TV series, a psychological thriller that has taken him a great deal of effort and in which we will see Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lesley Manville and Cate Blanchett, who is the protagonist, the journalist Catherine Ravenscroft, famous for television documentaries in which she reveals transgressions, embarrassments and misconduct of public figures and institutions. Respected and feared, she finds herself on the other side of the lens when a mysterious novel by an unknown author (Kline’s Stephen Brigstocke) appears on her bedside table. It is a story in which she is the leading performer and in which disturbing details of her past are laid bare, dark secrets that she had hoped to have buried and which now risk resurfacing because of the author’s desire to inflict pain and humiliation on her whom she considers the cause of her misfortunes. Catherine struggles against time to discover the writer’s true identity and to prevent the revelations from overwhelming the life she has built with her husband Robert (Baron Cohen) and son Nicholas (Smit-McPhee). Everything – more or less – as in Renée Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, published in Italy as ‘The Perfect Life‘, on which Cuarón based himself to write the seven episodes then brought to the set during the 280 days of filming that ended in March 2023. ‘I am sure there is an explanation to our being so easily the object of other people’s judgement… The problem is when these judgements do not derive from facts, but from what someone says,’ the director pointed out, highlighting the story’s central issue. He continues to consider Disclaimer ‘a seven-hour film’, which we will see on Apple TV+ from October 11th with the first two episodes, followed by new episodes every Friday until November 15th.
