I’m sitting here trying to collect my thoughts on the sexual confidence of Catherine Ravenscroft. Young Catherine Ravenscroft, that is, the one played by Leila George on the Italian seaside on a fateful day years ago. I’m trying to capture the confidence with which she approaches, discomfits, flirts with, and effectively seduces smitten young amateur photographer Jonathan Brigstocke before so much as touching him. The best I can come up with is this:
She approaches this young man from the sea with the towering swagger of the invincible. She immediately puts him on he back foot by catching him taking photos of her and her son Nick in he first place, then teasing him about misidentifying the Mediterranean Sea as “the ocean.” When pressed, Jonathan says he took the pictures because of “a rim of sun” that was glowing around her, “like an aura.”
It was at this point that I wrote in my notes “she’s so confident you just wanna die.” But I hadn’t heard anything yet.
“And you liked this aura,” she says. She leans on the word every time she says it, imbuing it with a multitude of meanings. “You thought it was pretty? This aura. How pretty?” She knows she’s not talking about an aura, but herself. She knows he knows it too.
“Very,” he stammers. “Very pretty.”
Oooooh wheeee, I wrote in my notes.
“What are you gonna do with them,” she inquires further. “Are you gonna look at them. You gonna look at the auras.” Her questions are phrased as statements, because she knows the answer. She’s being coy about it, but you and I don’t need to be, friend: She’s saying, not wondering if, he’s going to masturbate to his photographs of her.
By this point she’s swaying in and out of the sunlight and it’s like a visitation from Aphrodite, blown ashore on a half-shell. I’d have jumped up and cheered when he grabs his stuff and follows her and her adorable son off the beach, carrying her stuff and befriending the boy — I’d have congratulated him for picking up what she was laying down and shooting his shot — if it weren’t for the fact I know he winds up dead because of it.
Clive Barker (of Hellraiser and Candyman fame) has said that he uses sex in his stories as a way to get people to go through the door the audience is screaming at them not to open. It’s an eminently reasonable move for any genre author to make. After all, how many times have you let thinking with your pants instead of your brain get you into trouble? Personally, I find it impossible to blame Jonathan for making his move, even though he has a girlfriend and she has a husband. Like the heart, the groin wants what it wants, and often the latter is the surest route to the former.
Catherine’s gargantuan level of erotic energy here makes for a marked contrast with her present day persona, and this fact is the source of the drama that drives much of this episode. While current Catherine isn’t sexless — she’s a glamorous artistic genius played by Cate Blanchett, you can only be so sexless under those conditions — her relationship with her toff husband Robert is more friendly than anything else. Apparently they’ve never quite been sexually compatible: he wants it more than her, she has more experience than him. It’s been a source of stress.
So you can imagine the stress that ensues when Stephen, Jonathan’s vengeful dad, sends Robert not only a copy of The Perfect Stranger — his wife’s pseudonymously published roman à clef about Jonathan’s death while saving Catherine’s son Nick from an unspecified life-threatening incident — but Jonathan’s pictures of Catherine in flagrante as well. Robert recognizes the hotel room as one he and Catherine had stayed in, the bed as one he and Catherine had slept in (slept in, not made love in), the lingerie she’s wearing as something he’d bought in hopes of spicing up their rote and sporadic sex life.
The revelation is pure poison for a man like Robert. We’re informed by Catherine’s oddly second-person voiceover narration that Robert has always felt insecure about his comparative lack of sexual experience. We learn directly from him that she’s gone as far as repeatedly faking migraines to avoid having sex with him. But most importantly, he can see from the photos that she’s giving the photographer more of her sexual self than he’s ever seen. The sight of her in this almost feral state both angers and arouses him, which angers him further.
This would all be bad enough without the realization that the story in the novel, which by now both he and their young-adult failson Nick (Kodi Smit-McPhee) have also read, is a true one. The monstrous character corresponding with Catherine killed someone, but was punished for it with death; by contrast, Catherine, Robert repeats hysterically, had thought she’d gotten away with it, until now. He leaves her standing in the middle of the street in their posh neighborhood, watching him drive away.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, between that supercharged first meeting with Jonathan on the beach and the departure of Robert from their marriage years later, Catherine had a meeting with Nancy (Lesley Manville), Stephen’s late wife. Dying of cancer, she confronts Catherine with the truth: Catherine lied to the police, she knew Jonathan, Jonathan died saving Nick, Nancy’s own life has been ruined as a result even before her cancer diagnosis, and she has no idea how Catherine can sleep at night. Catherine, here played by a subtly de-aged Cate Blanchett, can only vomit out inadequate apologies and flee the restaurant. (It’s a mirror image of the scene in which Robert grills Nick about the Italy trip at a pub.)
I think it’s all pretty wonderful stuff, hot and raw and ruthless. Indeed, both the character and camera work, courtesy of writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, are so strong that it papers over the fact that we’re watching someone execute a hoary old revenge plot. That in itself is a noble service; it’s what makes Hitchcock Hitchcock, after all.
Unfortunately, the fine work done by Cuarón and his cast is too often affixed with training wheels by the needless narration. I can’t think of a thing the disembodied voices of Catherine and Stephen say that wouldn’t be more interesting to either hear from the characters’ own visible lips or see acted out by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Leila George. To use Robert as an example, why have Catherine’s voiceover inform us of his feelings of inadequacy when they’re not only written all over his face when he sees the photographs, but almost expressed in so many words during his and Catherine’s subsequent confrontation over them? Why tell us he’s disappointed and disgusted with his son when these feelings are unmissable? A tiny dialogue tweak would abrogate the need for narration entirely, trusting not only the cast and the camera to convey what’s going on within, but also the audience to understand.
Disclaimer is hamstrung by that narrator conceit. It’s similarly weakened by the the universal flaw in all of these buried-trauma-backstory shows: the flashbacks that give us a view into the protagonists’ innermost thoughts always avoid the key stuff until the story calls for it. Generally speaking, brains don’t work that way. I mean, I wish I had the luxury of only thinking of the worst things that have ever happened to me when narratively or thematically appropriate; more often, it happens when I’m just trying to make a quick run to the grocery store to buy some hummus. I don’t see why it would be any different for Catherine Ravenscroft, a documentarian in the habit of recording and playing back her observations. Avoiding the situation by never looking into Nancy’s lie about being a widow is one thing, but I simply don’t buy that Catherine would avoid looking Jonathan’s death itself straight in the eye now that it’s been dredged to the surface.
But I’ll put up with this annoyance for Blanchett as another woman on the verge, for Kline as a tweedy Iago, for Baron Cohen as a good-enough driven to bitterness at his ambitious spouse by not being great, for George as a woman who’d emphatically like to be something other than a wife and mother for once, for Lesley Manville as a woman willing to use her own mortality as a jump scare to shame the woman who destroyed her family. Throw in some Cuarón long takes and impressionistic lighting — in concert with top-tier cinematographers Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel — and you have a thriller that’s thrilling in a whole different way.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
