In the rich out-of-competition section dedicated to series of this edition of the Venice Film Festival, Disclaimer, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón e streaming from October 11 on Apple TV+lives up to expectations. Which were quite high because of Cuarón, who, since 2003, has been collecting nominations for the Academy and Oscars – the last one for Roma as best director in 2019, already Golden Lion in Venice the year before – as if it were the easiest thing in the world. But also because of the cast, starting with Cate Blanchett in the role of the protagonist, and then Sacha Baron Cohenknown for being sparing in his interpretations, 5 in 25 years, who plays her husband, Kodi Smit-McPhee (the young revelation of The Power of the Dog of 2021, here in Venice also in Maria by Pablo Larraín) as the couple’s troubled son, and again Kevin Kline e Lesley Manville in the role of the “antagonists”.
What is the most appropriate punishment for a person who has made exposing other people’s secrets her job and the source of her success if not to be exposed herself for something terrible that belongs to her past and that she has managed to bury for twenty years?
This is what happens to Catherine Ravenscroft, a famous journalist and documentary author whose her comfortable and quiet life is turned upside down when she receives a noveltitled The Perfect Strangerwhich, in reality, is nothing more than the story of a “dirty” episode that he successfully buried for a long time.
Three narrative lines that intertwine. In the present we find Catherine grappling with that shameful truth. Suddenly revealed not only to her, but also to her husband, again through the sending of the novel, in her case enriched by the prints of a roll of photographs taken at the time and which constitute the proof, if nothing else, of Catherine’s relationship with Jonathan, a boy she met on the beach, during a holiday in Italy.
The second narrative line, between past and present, concerns the two parents (Kevin Kline and Lesley Manville) of Jonathan, who drowned that same summer after meeting Catherine. From the pain of the loss, followed by the woman’s illness and death from cancer, we proceed to the revenge plan put into action by the widower.
