No film festival has embraced TV as much as Venice has this year, with Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Disclaimer’ premiering as the first of four small-screen projects from acclaimed directors.
Photo: Apple TV+
Like a comedian with an Ozempic prescription or your favorite online recapper, all the fanciest film festivals are trying to get into the TV business. It’s been happening since at least 2017, when Cannes screened two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, but ever since the pandemic blurred the lines between film and TV, the practice has exploded. Last year, Cannes saw the controversial debut of The Idol, while TIFF played a supersized episode of Lulu Wang’s Expats, and the New York Film Festival premiered the first three episodes of Showtime’s The Curse. If you don’t screen at least one episode of TV by a director in the A24 family, are you even a real festival?
But no film festival has embraced television as much as Venice has this year: The official slate includes not one, not two, but four television projects helmed by acclaimed directors. From Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón comes Disclaimer, an adaptation of Renée Knight’s 2015 novel that will hit AppleTV+ in October. Next to screen is Families Like Ours, a Danish climate-change survival epic from Another Round’s Thomas Vinterberg. Then comes The New Years, a decade-spanning romance from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Finally, Joe Wright’s M. Son of the Century, a miniseries about the rise of Benito Mussolini airing on British TV next year. And these are not lone episodes. Each of them is screening in full.
For these projects, the appeal of launching at a place like Venice is obvious. They get an added jolt of prestige, and a buzzy red-carpet premiere that helps them stand out among the thousands of series hitting streaming each month. The festivals benefit too, getting another starry photo opportunity and the chance to maintain their relationships with an auteur class increasingly comfortable with the smaller screen. The only unhappy party in this arrangement are journalists on the ground, who prefer simply to skip these titles — if they can. Do you know the chaos an entire season of TV inflicts on a film-festival schedule?
However, this arrangement does come with a few side effects. On a minor note, the bevy of TV projects throws into stark relief the relative lack of Netflix at Venice. Two years after opening the festival with Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, the streamer didn’t have a single film in competition until acquiring Pablo Larraín’s Maria on the eve of its Lido premiere. It also means that, quite by accident, Venice and its fellow festivals have waded into one of the most contentious issues in modern criticism: Whether a season of TV should aspire to feel like “a 10-hour movie,” or something else. You can lay blame at Cannes for this, too. Had those French cinephiles not chosen to premiere Twin Peaks: The Return, then perhaps their compatriots at Cahiers du Cinéma would not have been emboldened to name the project the best film of the 2010s, setting off a debate that rages to this day.
One reason critics get upset about the “10-hour movie” is that, on most occasions, it is a lie. You cannot shoot a TV show like a 10-hour movie for the simple fact that TV shows shoot much faster, and more cheaply, than movies. What is most fascinating about Disclaimer, the first of these series to play the Lido, is that it illustrates the difficulties inherent in the 10-hour movie approach. Because this is the rare occasion where the talking point is true: This limited series really was shot as if it was a six-hour movie.
I’m sure Venice would have loved to advertise Disclaimer as Cuarón’s first-ever TV series, but it isn’t — he previously co-created the ill-fated NBC series Believe in 2014. Still, as his first effort since Roma six years ago, it demands attention. Cate Blanchett plays Catherine Ravenscroft, a British documentarian who’s essentially a more benevolent Lydia Tár. Her life is upended one day when she receives a manuscript apparently based on a secret she’s kept for 20 years. Unbeknownst to her, it was sent by Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), a lonely widower who blames Catherine for the death of his son, Jonathan (played by Louis Partridge in sequences that may be flashbacks, or may be dramatizations of scenes from the manuscript).
Like a lot of contemporary television, Disclaimer feels extremely well-pedigreed while never really matching the sum of its parts. (Even the people who are not supposed to be characters in a manuscript have trouble behaving like real humans.) Unlike a lot of contemporary television, it looks fantastic, full of bravura long takes and deep-focus shots that would make Orson Welles blush. As the Mexican auteur revealed at the show’s official press conference, that’s because he shot the seven episodes the same way he shoots his movies.
“I don’t know how to direct TV,” Cuarón said. “We approached the whole thing as a film.” While many showrunners might make that claim as a boast, Cuarón called it a “miscalculation.” Disclaimer shot for over 200 days, with two different cinematographers. “To shoot a film takes long, and this was like seven films. I feel for the actors, because they were stuck in those characters for way too long.” With reshoots taken into account, production lasted almost an entire year.
A tale of heroic endurance, overstretched ambition, and vast expense? Maybe this thing deserves to be called a movie after all.
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