Disclaimer’s first episode’s first scene begins is an iris slowly opening on two college kids fucking on a moving train with the Italian countryside in the background. A conductor knocks on their cabin door, demanding their tickets. The guy, Jonathan (Louis Partridge), scrambles to find them while using the sheet hiding the girl, Sasha (Liv Hill), to cover himself up, unsuccessfully. The conductor leaves and the young couple fall back together in bed, laughing and making love once again. This is filmed as a continuous shot, lasting two and a half minutes.
Disclaimer’s first episode’s second scene beings with a close-up of Cate Blanchett, a move that has never steered a filmmaker wrong since her estimable career began. In a scene that feels like a clear and deliberate riff on Tár, we’re introduced to her as an enormously talented, successful, and wealthy artist, in this case a documentarian rather than a composer-conductor. Once again, this figure, her named Catherine Ravenscroft is beloved by the intelligentsia and toasted by one of their IRL avatars, with Christiane Amanpour subbing in for Adam Gopnik. Once again she is greeted with warm applause. Have you seen Tár, by the way? Familiar with how things work out for her in that movie? Just asking, no reason.
Disclaimer’s first episode’s third scene begins with a close-up of Kevin Kline — and with his voiceover narration, which reveals him to be an elderly English boarding-school teacher named Stephen Brigstocke. Not, I think, what I expected from Kevin Kline. He’s a certain kind of teacher, too: burned out, contemptuous enough of the children and their let-me-speak-to-the-manager parents to stand by comments that cost him his job. Once, he laments — at least I think he laments; perhaps he doesn’t care at all — that he was “voted Most Popular Teacher of the Year…but that was years ago.”
Then we’re back to the young lovers on the train platform in Venice, spilling their belongings all over the place and making out lying there on the ground as they pick it all up. Then we’re back to the documentarian, who lives with her very wealthy, very well-meaning, but nevertheless somewhat affected and ineffectual husband (Sacha Baron Cohen, believe it or not); her own voiceover narration has kicked in, which is how we get this assessment of the man. They have a cat that seems to be everywhere at once.
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The old man’s wife, we learn, died nine years ago.
The documentarian receives a book called The Perfect Stranger, dedicated to “my son, Jonathan” — the name of the horny Venice vacationer. “DISCLAIMER,” reads a page near the beginning. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”
Jonathan and his girlfriend romp on a gondola, carefree and hypersexual in the way of young people besotted enough with each other to call it love.
The old man finds his late wife’s purse. Photos of Jonathan are inside.
The documentarian reads the book, remembers something sexual that happened to her in Venice, and vomits repeatedly, lying to her husband about why.
The old man sees more pictures, these ones of a beautiful blonde woman (Leila George), older than his son. In Venice.
Ohhhhhh, I thought. I get it now.
Displaying many of the visual and storytelling strengths brought to his acclaimed and (it’s fair to say) beloved films across an array of genres — coming-of-age, fantasy, autofiction, science fiction, literary adaptation — creator/writer/director Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer grabs your attention right from the outset. I don’t mean because it opens with a sex scene, although yes, that too. I mean that each of these opening scenes is a thing worthwhile in itself — the variety in the tone of the performances and color palettes and emotional tone across the three storylines, all of them executed to a nicety.
Adapting the novel of the same name by Renée Knight, Cuarón is, admittedly, working with some somewhat shopworn tropes of contemporary literary thrillers, which makes Dislcaimer as much of a genre piece as Children of Men or the Harry Potter movies. (It’s just not what we usually think of when we think of genre, that’s all.) So you have a strong, beautiful woman with cracks showing in the edifice, cracks related to a traumatic backstory that will slowly be revealed over time, usually coinciding with the instigating incident or climax of whatever problem is facing her in the here and now. (Lady in the Lake, True Detective: Night Country, you know the drill.) I’m no longer impressed by the sleight of hand involving in revealing things in bits and pieces. If you’re like me and would prefer to see things happen, rather than characters remembering things happening, well, consider yourself warned.
That being said…I mean, I don’t know how you can argue with where Cuarón and company get as a result. For example, I’m all aboard the current phase of Cate Blanchett’s career, where every so often she plays an evil version of herself, i.e. a preposterously beautiful and talented and successful artist at the height of her career.
But I’m equally here for American actor Kevin Kline playing a vindictive Mister Chips, wearing his dead wife’s ratty cardigan as he plots vengeance. He self-publisher a based-on-the-true-story-of-their-son’s-death novel his late wife wrote in a years-long bout of depression before she died of cancer after discovering it in a locked drawer. He then starts using it to torment Catherine, who of course is the mysterious blonde in his son’s photos, and was a known quantity in the case who covered up her obvious involvement. You have to imagine that her profuse vomiting upon reading the book is an indication her involvement runs pretty deep indeed.
And I fully buy Partridge and Hill as Jonathan and Sasha, a couple in that phase where you can’t stop touching, or talking about, or thinking about genitals, yours and the other person’s. That doesn’t mean their affection isn’t genuine — on the contrary, it seems easy and playful and sincere. But it does mean that this is not a young man who’s going to behave himself in Italy, left to his own devices. The moment he starts snapping pictures of a lovely blonde mother and her little son, silhouetted against the sun on the water, you just know it’s over for him. Just how over remains to be seen.
Throughout the episode, Cuarón wants to make things look good. Long takes follow characters around their environments, art-directed and photographed in a variety of rich and appealing color schemes. You do get the de rigeur digital-color blue and gold at one point, but it’s in the awards-banquet scene, which feels appropriate; beyond that he consistently surprises, from real old-school rosy-fingered dawn in Catherine’s kitchen to Jonathan’s long, simultaneously guileless and objectifying pan up young Catherine’s body in the white-gold sun.
It’s really not that much of a trick anymore to show the audience things out of order and then blow their minds by putting them together the right way. Lost did it in 2004, and after 20 years it’s probably time for a bit of a new routine. But Disclaimer pulls it off by making the individual puzzle pieces so interesting to observe that you don’t mind the motion of the filmmaker’s hands as he puts the picture together.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York Times, andanyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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