It’s Time for My Voice to Be Deferred

In the latest installment of Screen Shots, Michael Szalay reviews Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple TV+ series “Disclaimer.”

By Michael SzalayNovember 9, 2024

• Television

• Film

This essay is part of the Screen Shots series, monthly takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.

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CRITICS HAVE STRUGGLED with Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer. Obligatory gestures to the filmmaker’s stature and the show’s gorgeous cinematography typically precede respectful suggestions that the new Apple TV+ drama is maybe just a bit overwrought and badly written. Some critics acknowledge that Cuarón has “something to say about perspectives and prejudices,” but decline to offer specifics. Others confess outright their befuddlement: “What’s Disclaimer about, then? […] [Y]ou’re never really supposed to know.”

Disclaimer’s dialogue is wooden, and its gorgeousness is overwrought. And the seven-part series does join a long list of psychological thrillers with untrustworthy perspectives and competing points of view (Cuarón genders that competition in a way that recalls Gone Girl [2014], The Affair [2014–19], and Fleishman Is in Trouble [2022] specifically). But Disclaimer is no garden-variety TV Rashomon. It provides an acutely self-conscious reassessment of Cuarón’s own filmography, the better to revisit a problem that has defined it.

“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence,” declares the show’s tagline. Documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) sees herself and a story from her past in The Perfect Stranger, a novel the embittered Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) has given to Catherine, her family, and her colleagues. Stephen believes that Catherine seduced and caused the death of his son years ago, and the novel tells that tale. Catherine’s moment of recognition when reading it, moreover, is as complex as it is crucial, for if, on one hand, Disclaimer bases its characters on Renée Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, it also asks viewers to see resemblances between it and earlier Cuarón films, whose characters, Cuarón has told us repeatedly, often bear a striking resemblance to the director himself.

To recognize Cuarón’s earlier films in Disclaimer is to recognize how intentionally it revisits a problem that runs through his oeuvre: with what presumption and at what cost does the director speak for his female characters, who often appear intent on guarding their privacy, even from the director himself? Present in some form in most of Cuarón’s films, that question assumes a special urgency in a drama about the damaging effects of disclosure. Some speech cannot be retracted; some claims cannot be reversed. Disclaimers reach a limit, as the telling asterisk in the drama’s title on promo materials might suggest.

Disclaimer first introduces Catherine looking directly into the camera, her expression enigmatic. For the first six episodes, she is a screen upon which viewers project their beliefs, judgments, and, above all, generic expectations. Disclaimer will take impossibly long, in fact, to tell Catherine’s version of the story that has upended her life. The wide-eyed boy whom she stands accused of seducing years ago was in fact a dead-eyed rapist. Much of what we have watched over the course of many hours turns out to have been the fever dream of men either titillated or unmoored by the prospect of Catherine’s seduction of a younger man.

“Now I can start,” Catherine says, in the final seconds of the penultimate episode. “It’s time for my voice to be heard.” But why is it time only now? Why six episodes of male fantasy and only one devoted to its dismantling? Disclaimer doesn’t really ask viewers to believe Catherine when she tells her husband that she tried to tell him the truth much earlier. Her narrative’s deferral—Disclaimer’s deferral of it, above all—is in fact the story.

Perhaps the show defers Catherine’s tale to better dramatize and, ultimately, disclaim Cuarón’s own complicated relation to the male sexual fantasy with which he’s often been fascinated. Maybe Disclaimer, a performance-art mea culpa, waits so long to hear from Catherine because Cuarón himself took so long to consider his female characters.

Cuarón’s early works depict impetuously desirous boys and men for whom women are idealized objects of obsession and conquest and in whose inner lives they are ultimately uninterested. In Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001), for instance, one of the film’s two generally oblivious boys sees from a car window the birthplace of his nanny (and Cuarón’s). He’s rendered briefly thoughtful, but the moment passes, and he resumes his good-natured self-absorption.

More recently, the director has seemed to turn with greater interest to his films’ women. Roma (2018) tacitly revisits Y tu mamá’s brief gesture to the nanny. A loving portrait of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a Mixteco domestic worker employed by an affluent family based on Cuarón’s, Roma follows her for days, within and beyond the household she keeps afloat. But the film holds its subject at a distance. “Cat got your tongue?” a character asks Cleo; she shakes her head. “Then why don’t you talk?” Her reticence has been the subject of debate. Cleo is, for Richard Brody, “a strong, silent, long-enduring, and all-tolerating type, deprived of discourse, a silent angel whose inability or unwillingness to express herself is held up as a mark of her stoic virtue”; as such, she “burnishes the director’s conscience while smothering her consciousness.” Carla Marcantonio, who served as Aparicio’s interpreter on press tours, counters by praising the film’s respectful refusal to presume upon her inner life, and by noting the character’s resonance with Indigenous domestic laborers who saw their life in Cleo’s and the film’s role in catalyzing workers’ rights movements within and beyond Mexico.

That tension in Roma might suggest that Disclaimer means to reclaim rather than disclaim Cuarón’s early work. Y tu mamá isn’t simply uninterested in its mysterious older woman; the film pointedly refuses to divulge a key fact she opts not to tell the boys—that she has been dying from a terminal illness all along. Moreover, their apparent change in emphasis aside, Cuarón’s early and later films all insist on the limits of what the camera, and its attendant male gaze, can ever know about the inner lives of their women, who remain in significant ways off-limits, especially to the director himself.

It matters fundamentally, in this respect, that Catherine does not want her story told. Telling it at all is an invasive act for which Cuarón atones throughout, linking himself to those who violate Catherine’s privacy—even her rapist. Whether the acute self-consciousness that results makes for good viewing is an open question; a more interesting one is whether that self-consciousness produces meaningful insight or still more male narcissism. It’s worth remembering, as the narrative builds toward Catherine’s long-deferred self-expression, that Disclaimer originates in Knight’s novel. Catherine’s story is ultimately Knight’s, and the narrative politics of when and how to tell it are overwrought indeed.

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A story about the retelling of stories, Disclaimer begins by retelling the director’s most famous one. Its first scene reshoots Y tu mamá’s: we iris-in on a painterly, rose-tinted dawn, seen from the window of a moving train. The camera pulls back and takes in two teens lustily rutting in a glowing, pastel-hued compartment. The train will enter a tunnel at the moment of coitus: a trite Hollywood convention that announces, along with the improbable colors, Disclaimer’s investment in cinematic contrivance.

Y tu mamá also begins with two teens vigorously fucking, a Harold and Maude poster in the background rather than a patently artificial countryside. The girl is about to leave for Italy and the boy and his best friend will travel with an older woman to the beach, where she initiates a life-changing sexual encounter with them. In Disclaimer, Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge), Stephen’s son, is left by his girlfriend in Italy, before making his way to another beach, where the older Catherine seduces him (The Perfect Stranger imagines) and where he will drown. Beaches, along with dawn and dusk, recur obsessively in Cuarón’s work, as boundaries that mark decisive transitions, from birth and rebirth to death to the collapse and reconstitution of families. Gravity (2013) and Roma conclude on beaches, Children of Men (2006) just off one. In Y tu mamá, the boys drift apart because of the intimacy they share on a beach. Disclaimer will culminate with a startling new account of Jonathan’s last day at the beach.

But at its outset, Disclaimer bludgeons viewers with a thesis statement. We watch the opening sequence iris-out to black and hear a voice-over—the one used in the trailer—that warns, “Beware of narrative and form.” They “can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.” We are at a Royal Television Society awards presentation, listening to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour—seeming to play herself—praise Catherine’s ability to see her subjects “as they really are” by breaking through “the veil” that protects “prominent institutions and their often-charismatic perpetrators.” But “be aware,” she repeats, that when tackling “some of the most difficult contemporary issues,” Catherine exposes not just her subjects but the ultimate source of their power to manipulate—“our own deeply held beliefs and the judgments that we make.”

During a subsequent flashback, Jonathan and Catherine joke about the “aura” that surrounds her silhouette when he takes her photograph into the sun. In this and other respects, “cinema” seems the institution most in question, Cuarón the charismatic perpetrator on trial. Amanpour warns us about narrative and form, but the show indulges in hallmark Cuarón effects. Shots use light sources with a mathematical exactitude, producing a hyperreal depth of focus here, or lens flares and glowing nimbuses around backlit profiles and objects there. Conspicuous color filters alter the moods associated with specific locales and characters. On average, shot takes feel shorter than in Y tu mamá and Roma, and there is less handheld camera work throughout. But the point is not to stabilize a single style; rather, Disclaimer deploys its techniques forensically, as evidence in a self-conscious thriller. Our rush to solve a crime and avert violence is also a rush to crack cinematic codes that are forms of evidence—and suspect in their own right.

For example, long handheld takes dominate the sun-drenched Italian scenes of the flashback on which we open and which we subsequently enter and leave via iris-ins and iris-outs. In this storyline, Jonathan is something of an independent filmmaker: he hungrily documents the women around him with his new Nikon, and we see in his hormonal scopophilia something of Cuarón’s own early New Wave passions. Conversely, when following Stephen many years later in his dingy, poorly lit home, the camera cuts frequently between largely stabilized shots. As he flips through a trove of once-hidden photographs, we zoom in and out from his point of view and cut back and forth between his face and the photos, scanning their partial, fetishized female bodies for relevant details, trying to put it all together in a way that makes sense.

These photos are the basis for Stephen’s novel The Perfect Stranger, which invents a narrative around the photos in a way that is analogous, Disclaimer wants us to know, to what Cuarón has done with Knight’s novel. Moreover, Stephen’s novel is not really his but his wife’s; he placed his name on a manuscript she wrote years ago, as Cuarón has with Knight’s novel.

This makes Stephen and Jonathan the true stand-ins for Cuarón, rather than Catherine, the documentary filmmaker. The incipiently erotic fervor with which Stephen sponsors his wife’s story—in other words, the eagerness with which he promulgates the lurid story of Catherine’s seaside seduction—is a substitute for Cuarón’s own erotic zeal, in Y tu mamá especially. And, indeed, as Disclaimer builds to a crisis of conscience in which Stephen must opt either to absorb Catherine’s truth fully or to keep telling himself a familiar story, we see the director performing his possibly too-belated willingness to see beyond his own desire.

Even so, that subtle self-implication and the implicit mea culpa that attends it are equivocal, equal parts reclamation and disclaimer. This thriller, seemingly ready to identify Cuarón as the agent around whose incipiently predatory desires all else turns, enshrouds itself in a thicket of laundered narrative. Catherine will finally speak; when she does, though, we have reason to ask ourselves once again, Whose story is this?

Stephen speaks to the audience in a past-tense, first-person voice-over. But the show has three distinct voice-overs—four, in fact, if we count Amanpour’s—and at least one of them seems, in employing the second person, to speak to Catherine and the audience together. Catherine narrates her own flashback, to Stephen, in the past tense. But more sustainedly, and mysteriously, a never-identified narrator (Indira Varma) comments on Catherine’s experiences, seemingly addressing her, the audience, and eventually Stephen in a present-tense second person, while speaking of her family more generally in the third. This voice points us to an ambiguous liminal space—a crepuscular, beach-like borderland—between the diegesis and the viewer’s present-tense consumption of it.

This is a space we’ve likely visited before.

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Disclaimer’s liminal space and unsourced voice recall the analogous space and voice in Y tu mamá. As Cuarón’s best critics have noted, that voice-over does not augment the narrative so much as gesture to what neither it nor its characters can assimilate about contemporary Mexico. Mexico is in chaos, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party loses its seven-decade grip on power. But we move blithely through it all with two privileged boys, one from the ruling elite, the other safely middle-class. The voice-over, however, breaks into the soundtrack, producing a brief silence before registering what the boys might have noticed but didn’t—what the film might have taken up but didn’t. Roma, by contrast, does not avoid the bloodshed in the streets, as the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971 spills into a furniture store where Cleo is shopping for a crib. The film’s political background is inextricable from its more quotidian foreground, even if, ultimately, Cleo’s reticence gestures to the unsaid or unsayable.

Disclaimer also stresses its disjunctions, the insufficiency of its sensory and perspectival integrations, but in a different way. Some will justifiably fault the show for its facile gesture, via Amanpour, to unnamed “contemporary issues.” Initially a disembodied voice in a blackout, she evokes Y tu mamá’s narrator, above all, as she seems to play herself, a journalist warning the audience of its complicity in the fiction that follows. But she says nothing at all specific about “the truth” that “narrative and form” might conceivably obscure.

Meanwhile, the show envelops us in the Ravenscrofts’ wealth and notes the condescension with which they, and white Britons generally, perceive London’s largely racialized working class. When Catherine’s husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) finds himself on public transportation for the first time in years, he scans the passengers and tries to imagine their daily lives: a Black woman who “works shifts” to support her family, a white “builder” likely begrudged the use of the bathroom by his rich clients. “He wonders whether his thoughts are racist or patronizing, or both, and decides they probably are,” the narrator tells us. He thinks himself a “sanctimonious twit,” and his pointedly liberal self-consciousness, one might argue, bespeaks the show’s own.

Disclaimer can feel no more interested in the lives of working-class Londoners than does Robert, whose NGO commits tax fraud on behalf of the wealthy. Overall, it seems more invested in the complexity with which “narrative and form” mediate judgments and beliefs than in any particular judgment or belief. Still, I suspect that a good bit of what seems stilted and overwrought about the dialogue, for instance, is meant to satirize this blindingly white, entitled family. The satire doesn’t land as it might, but it matters, at least obliquely, to the drama’s sexual politics, which also turn on the distortions and ultimate limits of sympathetic understanding; as a disembodied voice narrates the feelings of both the “you” that is Catherine and the “you” that is the audience, “we” experience a chasm the drama knows it cannot span.

When at last Catherine tells her story, it’s an ugly one. The seaside seduction that Stephen imagined—a version of which Cuarón himself once imagined—was in fact a horror. Jonathan was not a wide-eyed romantic, innocent of history; he was a cold-blooded predator who brutalized her for three hours. “Your wife wrote very accurately about my hotel room, what I was wearing,” Catherine tells Stephen, “but she couldn’t fathom what I was feeling.”

Even so, there is no catharsis in the revelation of these feelings. This is not a story Catherine needed to get out. When her rapist died, she became the sole owner of her story; it was hers to control. To make it public would have been to put herself on trial, which is of course what happens when Stephen publishes The Perfect Stranger (which, meaningfully, his wife opted not to publish). This is a story Catherine is forced to tell—one that viewers, along with Stephen and Cuarón, have forced her to tell.

Perhaps because of that coercion, Disclaimer either cannot or will not fully assimilate the story. When Catherine recounts the rape, the film flashes back visually but we hear only the hum of the refrigerator in Stephen’s shabby kitchen. A dog barks in the distance. Echoing Y tu mamá, the film dissociates, splits between an aural track, by implication more proximate to the viewer, and a fragmented visual record of the event in question. In an important sense, Disclaimer remains disassembled, broken.

After Robert learns the truth, the camera captures him, bent over, and Catherine, serene and distant, in a hospital waiting room that buzzes around them. He is whimperingly contrite, while she tells him she will never forgive him for managing news of her rape so well, when news of her infidelity unmoored him. As she speaks, the couple seem to detach from their environment. Bystanders speed up, appear and disappear, and the camera seems to jump them ahead in time, while the couple carry on to no changed effect. They’ve become an island out of time, distinct from what’s around them.

That rupture is only ostensibly repaired in a final scene that, disquietingly, recalls Cuarón’s renderings of The Perfect Stranger. The family’s gorgeous townhouse is shot from outside, overexposed and rendered gauzy against spring flowers. Catherine, now living alone, consoles her son. They are reconciled and embrace upon the couch, chastely and tenderly, as mothers and sons should, just before we fade to white.

That’s the ending we have wanted, is it not?

As if to ask that question—and to remind us, amid this happy ending, to “beware of narrative and form”—there stands beside the couch an enigmatic, faintly off-white statue of a woman. We cannot make out its features. Is that the TV audience, satisfied Catherine has spoken at last? The workers upon whose backs this lovely home was built? Or is it Catherine, entombed now in the drama’s saccharine close, her perfect living room a living sepulcher?

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Stills from Disclaimer (2024) courtesy of Apple.