I am watching a series on Apple TV that I do not recommend, but I am finding it hard to stop watching. I won’t say “I can’t stop watching.” That is both defeatist and non-Christian. And when I say I don’t recommend it, I would just warn that there is some (a lot) pretty graphic, in my book pornograpic sex that you must skip through. It starts in a restaurant seduction scene and goes on for quite a while.
Yet, there are some interesting thematic and narrative aspects of it that 1. make me want to think through them and 2. make me want to read the novel it is based on.
There is an important but overlookable scene at the very beginning of the “show” which is, I think, six episodes and produced and directed by Alphonse Cuaron, a filmmaker I have admired in the past for Gravity, Roma, and Children of Men. In this opening scene, Christiane Amanpour (which is breaking the line between reality and fiction) is announcing an award for the main character, Catherine Ravenscroft, as well known journalist and documentarian. Catherine is played by Cate Blanchett as a middle-aged woman and by Leila George as a younger woman.
That choice helps us not have to deal with Cate being de-aged electronically. I also wonder if Cate didn’t want to do the graphic sex scenes with a much younger actress. I don’t understand how these actors can be stark naked and roll around on each other in front of others anyway. Do they want their children to see that stuff? Do they just disassociate themselves, like victims do?
In Amanpour’s speech, I think we see the complexity of the film and our response to it. Catherine is being lauded for her unflinching portrayal of truth that cuts through power structures and powerful charismatic leaders, and these portrayals, Amanpour says, expose ourselves. Soon we are introduced to a narrative through different sets of eyes, notably Catherine’s, her husband’s, and a third character, her adversary. In fact, there is a voice-over, the same voice for all of them, but it is expressing their thoughts at various times.
Actually, I should say that the film starts with two young people on a train in Italy having sex and being disturbed by the conductor to see their passports. Then we hear from Amanpour, and then we are switched to an elderly British man reflecting on how he was let go from his teaching job after fifty years for being old school. This person is played by Kevin Kline, whom I didn’t recognize and whose British accent is serviceable.
And the story unfolds as to how these people are related; the young man on the train is the son of the teacher, twenty-five years before. And so it goes. I won’t give it away. If you do watch it, you’ll want to enjoy it yourself, and if you don’t, it won’t matter much to you. Suffice to say that Catherine did something very, very bad 25 years before and her secrets are going to be disclosed to the adoring journalistic world.
Yet whose version of the story are we really seeing? The father’s? His wife, who wrote a book about it based on some lurid photos she found? Catherine, who has tried to conceal the truth? It struck me the other night when I watched the breathtaking scene where her crime takes place, whose version are we being asked to trust? And what does it say about us? Who is the good guy here? Is the crime’s victim really a victim? (I say this because he’s a pretty obnoxious late teenager, a voyeur (taking photos without permission), an adulterer, and he cheats on his girlfriend (within a day of being separated from her), yet he tries to do something heroic because….we’re not sure why. He’s cipher on whom you can impress our ideas, as Amanpour says.
Is it possible that the book written by the mother (who has long since died in this story) is a fiction within a fiction, rather than a trustworthy narrative within a fiction, and we are being manipulated by it? Is it possible that all storytelling is manipulative? We used to use the term “slice of life” fiction, but all of it is slice of human experience, just a slice that defies an easy knife cut.
There are at least two more episodes; we will see what happens to Catherine the suppose truth-teller who lives lies, or at least lives by concealing her own. More to think about. I just hope I don’t have to fast forward through the writhing naked bodies.
(The acting is very good in this series.)
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