2023-08-16 08:01:46
by Maurizio Porro
The eight-episode miniseries tells the story of Michael Peterson, the protagonist of one of the most controversial judicial cases in the history of the United States
Sometimes the true, dramatic Time.news of an event that happened and which has not yet found the single key to the truth, seems an interesting and true subject in a way that no screenwriter could ever have written. One comes to think of it by attending the eight exciting episodes of “The Staircase – A suspicious death” written and directed by Antonio Campos with Maggie Cohn, with superstar Colin Firth (Sky and streaming on NOW). A story on which many brains have already been squeezed, there is a French documentary in thirteen episodes released in 2018, directed by Jean-Xavier deLestrade, and based on the same story (now visible on Netflix) in which the characters are the real ones.
The ending, without revealing anything, is Pirandellian: to each his own truth and the American judicial system puts itself on display. The date to mark is December 9, 2001 just under Christmas, Santa Claus, in Durham, North Carolina: that night Professor Michael Peterson called 911 for an ambulance because his wife Kathleen lay dead after an accidental fall along the narrow wooden stairs at the corner of their apartment. How many calls did the husband make? And how did he really find his wife? A wrong foot? The man who bangs her head against the wall? Or maybe a bird of prey, an owl that speaks of him, given that the house is infested with bats? And what was the murder weapon? The fireplace object that was later found untouched in the garage?
The coroner, given the enormous amount of blood and the deep lesions of the skull, concluded that it was a matter of homicide and the autopsy will confirm the thesis. Her husband, a successful novelist, was arrested and the film takes care of showing us the various stages of the trial, it becomes a “court movie” with the judge, the witnesses, the jury members, the complicit glances among the members of an extended family , which contemplates previous marriages: her children, his children, the two adoptive ones, her sisters. Each of which has its own idea of how things went. In each episode of the excellent HBO product, in a delicate balance between fiction and document, we come to know something more, along the ridge made up of flashbacks in which we see the happy spouses, after having rented and seen a stupid sentimental film, consuming by the pool the last part of the fatal evening.
Then the wife returns and discovers on her husband’s computer, which he had to use for work, the man’s bisexual life, dedicated to dating men and boys. It seems like one of the cases of femicide that our daily lives are filled with, with particular gossip that makes it a morbid and much-talked-about episode due to the intellectual notoriety of the protagonist to whom Colin Firth gives a truth that is never self-reported but strong in doubt, uncertain and at the same sentimental time: hate and love, you can at the same time said the poets. But the court must finally decide, the scene is gruesome, and the film continues following the stages of the court case even today that Peterson is on bail.
One of those cases in which the media throws itself into fish to quell curiosity, a rich and famous man, a populous family, a double bisexual life: what more could you want, considering that it was all life lived? Thanks to leaps in time we have the opportunity to admire not only the expressive sensitivity of Firth, but also that of Toni Colette, the unfortunate wife on whom the doubt remains: was she or not informed about her spouse’s double life? The series is based heavily on the documentary material shot from 2002 to 2018, an eternity of life and sentences, not only of the accused, but of his lawyer and of all the children who in the meantime grow up, judge, cultivate doubts. So the case was studied on the French material (but there are many rumors about the relationship between the two directors and the costs of their collaboration) and moreover also in the new thriller «The Staircase» we see a French troupe filming the facts and of which he is a part the very good Juliette Binoche who will carve out an essential emotional role towards the accused.
It’s a bit what Bertolucci did in “Last Tango in Paris”, in which he enjoyed filming inside the film, even what Jean-Pierre Lèaud is shooting. The Petersons were a family with a large intellectual-social quotient: in addition to Michael, Kathleen, born on February 21, 53, was the first woman to be admitted to engineering school and had a successful career at a communications company. The fatal meeting with Peterson took place in 1986, then the long cohabitation and the wedding in 1997, because both were already married with sons and daughters, including the two adoptive daughters of the deceased friend who also fell down the stairs and this will not be irrelevant for the debate, given the strange coincidence. The Petersons cultivated behind closed doors a series of neuroses and problems that her death brought to light and that many in court claimed to have known for some time, therefore compatible with an average petty bourgeois happiness, ruined precisely in the Christmas atmosphere. We do not reveal the course of the trial whose question is: was it an accident or a mad beating?
The twists and turns are plentiful: Mr. Peterson is accused of first-degree murder on December 20, 2001, but the series reopens the case and offers more than one solution, always without betraying the truth. The trial began on July 11, 2003, among the texts also an escort (in Michael’s computer there were over 2000 images of naked men), but among the suspects also that of a possible financial difficulty, given the debts on the credit card , as some newspapers wrote. On October 10, 2003 Peterson was sentenced to life imprisonment, but in December 2011 he was granted a new trial after eight years in prison. At the age of 68, having paid a bail of 300,000 dollars, the man went under house arrest pending the new investigation… and here one last twist is still missing, but in the meantime the man still lives in Durham, but has moved house. And the exciting series ends with the image of profound solitude.
August 16, 2023 (change August 16, 2023 | 08:01)
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