On Netflix, an excellent miniseries challenges family values and wealthy people.
This article comes from Figaro Magazine
Very rich people are the honey of filmmakers, who love to mock them, ridicule them, caricature them; to underline or rather highlight their faults, their failings, their flaws. It is often vain, tedious and boring. Except when, from subjects of simple Manichean comedy, the wealthy become subjects of sentimental drama: they then take on a universal dimension. The spectator who does not pay the IFI is then finally captured, even captivated.
This is the case with Susanne Bier’s American miniseries A perfect couple*, set at the luxurious Winbury family estate on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. The morning after the wedding party of one of the house’s three sons, the body of a female guest is found dead, floating in the waters outside the property. Suicide? Accident? Murder? As in Twin Peaks, where the investigation to find “who killed Laure Palmer?” is just a pretext to spread the secrets of a small town, the investigations of the local police uncover the back kitchens of the house. And they are not pretty, pretty.
Looks like a giant Cluedo
Dominated by Nicole Kidman, imperial as a successful novelist and an arrogant and contemptuous American bourgeois who has made her life a necklace of lies, and her alcoholic husband (Liev Schreiber, grandiose), the “perfect family” is made up of some real rascals. And her relatives and extras too. Hence the supporting roles, all exciting… and suspect in these four and a half hours that look like a giant and living Cluedo.
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No drop in pace, twists and turns galore, delicious dialogues (“those who wear flip-flops in public should be arrested”), culinary discoveries (oysters with cherries and honey): we are enjoying ourselves. Chic cherry on the wedding cake (cancelled): Isabelle Adjani as a nymphomaniac friend of the family (especially of the father and the youngest son…). As a good Frenchwoman, she claims to be an expert in Chablis and in matters of love. In her mouth, every trivial term, every vulgarity is tinged with an oxymoronic elegance. And every scene in which she appears at least brings a smile.
* Netflix, 6 episodes of 45 minutes.
