Disclaimer has restored our faith in TV sound

Voiceover commentary is designed to provide information that is not readily available on screen. Whether it’s a third-person narrator who takes us into the thoughts of the characters we’re watching or a protagonist who gives us their supposedly unfiltered thoughts, this storytelling device lives to tell, not show. That’s why it’s often considered a form of storytelling, primarily in an audiovisual device such as television the image is king. Expressing feelings in words feels unnecessary and even more unnecessary. Used well, however, it can be a fun way to make us question what we’re watching and how stories are shaped by the way they’re told and how they end up. what—and, most of all, who.

Apple TV +’s Freedom, which marks Academy Award Winner Alfonso Cuarón’s entry into television, he understands how the repetition of the voice can complicate and exemplify a story about trust and guilt, prejudice and the experiences of individual, about what we remember and how that informs other people. , but especially the stories we tell and about ourselves. This magazine, adapted from Renée Knight’s novel of the same name, uses more than just two narrators. It’s another way in which this story, of a filmmaker whose life changes for the better when a fictionalized book about a past he’d hoped to forget arrives on his doorstep. , aims to complicate the storytelling process. And in doing so it creates one of the most creative voiceovers on contemporary American television.

The moment we first meet Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) is this moment Freedom presents its central thesis: “Pay attention to story and character,” Christiane Amanpour tells the audience gathered to present Catherine with an award for her historic filmmaking career. “Their power can bring us closer to the truth but it can also be a powerful weapon of control.” In its first four chapters, Freedom made all this clear. Straddling between three different time periods (and the curator’s perspective), this careful study of three characters constantly warns us not to take what we see for granted. It asks us, as Catherine’s work has done for people like Amanpour, to question what we are watching and why, perhaps, we are allowed to see and hear what is in front of us. .

There is an ironic effect in the way Cuarón, who wrote and directed all episodes of this London miniseries, translated Knight’s prose to the screen. In this book, the chapters alternate between a third-person narrator who describes Catherine’s unraveling and a first-person narrator who walks us through why they decided to target Catherine by publishing the book with a line that gives with the title of this book: “Any resemblance. to people living or dead is not a coincidence.” It is that statement that ends up haunting Catherine as soon as she realizes a holiday trip to Italy where a happy meeting with a young man that ended in disaster has been turned into a book with the title. The Perfect Stranger. That’s the moment Knight opens his book with: It’s late at night, and Catherine is washing herself in the bathroom. She dismisses her fat husband and stares at herself in the mirror, not quite sure why this well-worded book has reached her home. It feels like an accusation. A threat even. On this page, the scene is still shocking. Knight writes: “He learns of this new and harsh light, and he wets a flannel, wipes his mouth and presses it to his eyes as if to banish the fear from them.”

When Cuarón makes this very scene, for a long time, he and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have made their signature style successful, a moment made all the more depressing by the accompanying soundtrack. For the small screen, the Mexican filmmaker has transformed Knight’s prose into a second-person narrator. British actress Indira Varma does not (only) describe what Catherine does and thinks; he does that by talking to us. “You’ve seen this face,” he says as Blanchett’s Catherine wipes her face. You hoped you would never see it again. Your mask has fallen. ” Second-person narration has a way of bringing us both closer and further away from the characters: By being placed in Catherine’s shoes, we are encouraged not only to feel for her but to be close to her. However knowing how far we are from him is a futile effort. We’ve never seen that face before. We don’t know what the mask is Freedom‘s narrator is talking about. For most of these first few episodes, it’s hard to understand what’s going on in Catherine’s mind as she tries to figure out who discovered the Italian trip and the tragedy that followed and what the outcome will be. . But he’s still a talker, and the voice-over, which would often help make his point clear to us eager listeners, here finds ways to keep him at bay. This is even more evident in the tone Varma takes; he is a disinterested reporter, whose voice makes it clear that he is neutral, just watching what is happening with Catherine and her surroundings.

On the other side of the screen is Kevin Kline, another preacher in the series. Where Varma is aloof, Kline’s Stephen Brigstocke is a troubled and overly sympathetic man. His voiceover takes us inside his mind, which is often racing with thoughts and complaints (not to mention sadness). As we learned, Stephen and his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) lost their son Jonathan (played by Louis Partridge) years ago while traveling in Europe. He is the one who published the book recounting Jonathan’s last days in Italy — and he is the one who made sure that, apparently, he returned not only his son but also his wife, who died of cancer and left him with a house empty. which requires a long time before. As Stephen tells us about the word “IV,” “When Jonathan died, Nancy was broken. His mind shrank to something small, dark, and all he could think about was the absence of our son.” His voice is bitter. And melancholy, too. He sounds like a broken man trying to understand what destroyed his family in the first place. As if to emphasize the darkness that Stephen describes, Cuarón presents a picture of a raven on the Brigstocke grill (which may not have been used since Stephen and Nancy first heard of Jonathan’s death abroad), undaunted by the opinion which Brigstocke speaks for us.

If Varma’s second-person narration keeps us strangely close but distant to Catherine, Kline’s voice makes us empathize with her and Nancy and (or especially) when her actions are get worse. Leaving the crow behind and following Stephen up the stairs as he yells at Nancy after dumping a dead fish in their fish tank, the former school teacher finds his wife in the bathtub of them. He didn’t try to kill himself (or so he claims). He was hoping to see how Jonathan felt before he drowned. It’s a harrowing scene, which all the more helps align our sympathies with the Brigstockes, who seem to live worlds away from the bourgeois wealth of Catherine, her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), and their son Nicholas ( Kodi Smit-McPhee).

It’s that quiet elegance The Perfect Stranger it is ready to break. Only, while Knight’s book gives its readers brief excerpts from it, Cuarón chooses not to give his viewers any words at all. Instead, he throws us into the honeyed, sunny, dreamy Italy of Nancy’s manuscript, but presented as what really happened when young Catherine, who was on vacation with Nicholas, who was then a child) met Jonathan. (who was walking alone, now he was a young man running). As mentioned in “IV,” those events lead to a climactic moment of sexual abandonment between the two, captured in moments by Jonathan’s camera, which Nancy used to draw in those days. the last of his fictitious account which Stephen used to ensnare Robert Ravenscroft. to read the said published report.

“Robert has to stop reading,” we hear Varma say to this the latest episode when those steamy dramas play out in his head (and our screens, in turn). You can only trust the printed word, and there is enough of his wife in the book to know him. He is still confused by the words about his wife that describe her image that Catherine herself will not be able to recognize (a fallen face, as we mentioned in the title “I”). Later we are informed: “The shock you felt when Robert looked at you again because those photos pierced you again. “He wants to be beaten. He thinks he deserves you.” A line like that shows why Cuarón’s style of storytelling is so great. He put his audience in a really uncomfortable position, not only by having to enter into the angry first person of Stephen’s righteous grief but also by constantly being made to feel uncomfortable about being talked about. such harsh words. That “you” is meant to embarrass us even if it won’t allow us to fully empathize with Catherine. Like the way he feels, his story is out of him, and it’s all these other people who are telling it to him.

As a filmmaker, Cuarón has long been legitimately invested in what his camera can show us. His sense of twisting, long shots that take you in and out of places, selfishly controlling what you can see (or not) in any given space, shines again here inside. Freedom. But it’s his decision to tap into his audience’s emotions and sympathies with his competing but complementary storylines—arguably the most inspiring use of them on American television in a long time— which turns this literary style into an entertaining piece of television. The one who refuses to be easy to show or talk, instead finds a way to make us both careful. And perhaps, in what feels like a calm demeanor it encourages at the beginning of each episode, of all the stories in a row.