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 and streaming from October 11 on Apple Tv+, lives up to expectations. Expectations were quite high due to Cuarón, who, since 2003, has collected nominations for the Academy Awards – the latest for Roma as Best Director in 2019, which had already won the 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 Cohen, known for being sparing in his performances, just 5 in 25 years, playing her husband, Kodi Smit-McPhee (the young revelation from The Power of the Dog in 2021, here at Venice also in Maria by Pablo Larraín) as the couple’s troubled son, and Kevin Kline and Lesley Manville as the “antagonists.”
What is the most appropriate punishment for a person who has made the revelation of others’ secrets their job and the source of their success if not to be exposed themselves for something terrible that belongs to their past and that they have managed to bury for twenty years?
That is what happens to Catherine Ravenscroft, a well-known journalist and documentary author whose comfortable and peaceful life is turned upside down when she receives a novel, titled The Perfect Stranger, which is, in fact, nothing but the account of a “dirty” episode she has successfully buried for a long time.
Three narrative threads intertwine. In the present, we find Catherine grappling with that shameful truth. Suddenly revealed not only to her but also to her husband through the sending of the novel, which in his case is enriched by prints of a roll of photographs taken at the time and which constitute proof, if nothing else, of Catherine’s relationship with Jonathan, a boy she met on the beach during a vacation in Italy.
The second narrative thread, weaving between past and present, concerns the two parents (Kevin Kline and Lesley Manville) of Jonathan, who drowned that same summer after his encounter with Catherine. From the grief of loss, followed by the illness and death from cancer of the woman, the plot moves towards the revenge plan put in place by the widower.