Credit: Special Arrangement
Let me also begin with a disclaimer. I love Alfonso Cuarón’s work — Gravity (2013), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), hands down the best in the series, Great Expectations (1998), Roma (2018) —one too many delights. And hence, I will be biased.
However, despite my rose-tinted glasses, Disclaimer is a terrible beauty at best. The title is based on a disclaimer at the beginning of a novel purportedly about a real incident. It reads: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” As the series progressed, I began to wonder if a disclaimer is actually necessary for the bizarrely robotic marriage Catherine and Robert, played by Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen, have. No, a 20-year-old marriage cannot possibly sustain such stiffness. This couple has the most stilted husband-wife exchanges ever in a beautiful house, shot in quintessential Cuarón’s style — think edgy camerawork and shifting-sand cinematography. This is especially evident in the bewitchingly filmed sex scenes and the catch-your-breath picturisation of a drowning. But the story itself is wafer-thin and admittedly stretched.
That said, Cuaron is a master at playing with the viewer’s sense of reality and illusion, and here too, he does that smartly with seeming disparate story threads — a gorgeous young man who drowns on an Italian beach, an incident that comes back to haunt a women documentarian, a so-called ‘beacon of hope’, and a musty professor bent upon taking revenge.
At its heart, this is a tale of grief, that bawling, utterly helpless sort of grief, the sly stories we tell ourselves, and the way we deal with our own darkness. The all-knowing narrator is the little voice inside all of us, and if you do dare to bare yourself while you hear her, she will ruthlessly plunge you into grey waters, murky thoughts, flotsam and all.