Tag: 2.01

TV review: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story; Save Me

★★★★☆

Donatella Versace is said to have been “happy” that Penélope Cruz was chosen to play her in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. I bet she was. Not half. Who wouldn’t be? But Cruz, let’s face it, isn’t the most obvious lookalike for a woman who these days is cruelly likened to Janice the Muppet. So it is a testament to Cruz’s skill that she is compelling in the role, a woman grieving after her brother’s murder, but flint-like in her resolve to keep the company and his name alive. “I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice,” she said through her blond wig and plumped-up lips, which — was this just me? — gave her words something of a whistle.

This is the second offering from American Crime Story and, like The People v OJ Simpson, it brims with class. Édgar Ramírez looked eerily like the real Versace in his ridiculously opulent Miami villa, where it took six members of staff to give him one glass of orange juice. But it is Darren Criss as Andrew Cunanan, the fantasist serial killer who shot Versace in 1997, who is the show’s tour de force. Criss manages just the right blend of camp charisma and obsessive weirdo mendacity as the contrast is made between the fêted designer’s eye-bleeding wealth and the sociopath’s empty life and wardrobe.

The opening eight minutes were terrific, set to Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor and culminating in Versace’s death, his blood dripping down the steps. The chronology switched after that and the story was told in reverse, which was slightly discombobulating. But the stage is set to reflect a society that was still judgmental about gay lifestyles and to chart Cunanan’s descent into deranged violence. The Versace company has distanced itself from the drama, saying it is based on “gossip and speculation”, even though Donatella reportedly sent Cruz flowers. Call me cynical, but this stuff can only ramp up the ratings.

TV review: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story; Save Me

Forget the Versace bling! It’s his sister who dazzles in this drama

★★★★★

Nothing says ‘tacky’ quite like the Versace logo. Other Continental fashion designers have elegantly intertwined initials for their brand, but Gianni Versace chose a doodle of Medusa, the goddess with snakes for hair.

It looks like the label on a £1.99 bottle of white wine at a rough Italian restaurant in Bedford.

Being that flaky takes talent, and money. His combination of wealth and sheer lack of taste was captured brilliantly in The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (BBC2), a dramatised retelling of the flamboyant couturier’s murder in 1997.

From the moment he slid from his silk sheets, to stand on the balcony of his Romanesque villa in Florida, Versace (Edgar Ramirez) looked like a Euro-lottery winner in desperate pursuit of class. Even his breakfast of melon slices, served by his butler on a silver platter, looked fake.

This nine-part, big budget docu-drama, scripted by London Spy’s Tom Rob Smith, revels in the plastic shallowness of Versace’s life. Everything was overdone, from the elaborate gates outside his palace where he was gunned down, to the head wound like a lotus blossom as he lay on the mortuary slab.

There’s no mystery about his killer. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) was a psychopath, a serial killer and a fantasist, who spun implausible stories about his past to everyone he met. The character painted here is very like Patricia Highsmith’s charming con merchant and murderer, The Talented Mr Ripley.

We saw him ambush and kill Versace, before the story leapt back seven years to their first meeting at a club in California, and a date at the opera — meetings that the Versace family deny ever took place.

Smith was at pains to point out how far from mainstream America the overt gay lifestyle was, just 20 years ago. One of the FBI agents investigating the shooting couldn’t tell the difference between Versace and Liberace.

Another was so eager to hear salacious details from Gianni’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) that the poor man had no chance to change out of his bloodstained robe. (That’s another factual dispute: the real Antonio says he never touched the body, and had no blood on him.)

The real protagonist of this piece is sister Donatella Versace, played by Penelope Cruz — a ruthless businesswoman, who seizes control of the company within hours of her brother’s murder. Psycho Cunanan is too contemptible and sick to hold our attention, but we won’t be able to take our eyes off the appalling Donatella.

Forget the Versace bling! It’s his sister who dazzles in this drama

The Assassination of Gianni Versace … by a lying, destructive nobody

Sitting in the sanctum of her brother’s mansion in Miami, just hours after his murder on the steps, Donatella Versace turns her grief into defiance: “I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice.”

Lending her immense beauty to the role, but borrowing acid blonde hair and a tight black leather outfit for it, Penelope Cruz looks slightly less like a late 1990s fashionista than an avenging angel, and nobody should be happier with her casting than Donatella Versace.

But if the Versace family have publicly distanced themselves from American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (BBC Two, Wednesday, 9pm), that scene seems to anticipate the reason. Why watch a loved one killed twice? Particularly when the show, however expertly made and gorgeous to look at, turns his murderer into a somebody?

Gianni Versace (a magnetic Édgar Ramirez) you already know – “It’s the jeans guy,” one crime scene cop helpfully explains – but if Andrew Cunanan(the implausibly handsome Darren Criss) is not a name that registers it’s because Versace’s killer really was a nobody: a prostitute, a chameleon and a fantasist, with nothing beneath it.

The first episode presents his slaughter like an operatic tragedy, as Gianni leaves the overdone Italianate opulence of his mansion for the trashy pastels of a sunny Miami morning, where his stalker awaits him in 1997.

Slain alongside a single white dove, Gianni’s death might be one worthy of an icon, or at least the launch of the new Spring collection, but writer Tom Rob Smith and director Ryan Murphy always bring something pointedly tacky into frame. A guy hawks a polaroid of the body. Tourists dip a magazine page in Versace’s spilled blood. An aspiring model struts for the TV news cameras. There’s no such thing as a designer death.

Instead, there’s a camp tension in everything. Cunanan had met Versace before, and their most significant conversation comes here on the set of an opera designed by Versace – luxurious and fake.

Versace, we understand, was a genius and a creator, but at the service of the wearer. Cunanan was a liar and a destroyer, ludicrously self-obsessed and burning with jealousy.

“I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day,” Versace tells him in that make-believe world of the opera set and brushes an eyelash from the young man’s face. Blowing it from the designer’s fingertip with the suddenness of a gun blast, we know what Cunanan wished for.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace … by a lying, destructive nobody

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 1 review

The success of American Crime Story: The People vs O.J. Simpson was a surprise to pretty much everyone. Arriving at a time when anthology shows were producing diminishing results and creator Ryan Murphy’s name was more synonymous with musicals and camp than it was ‘prestige’ drama, most people went in expecting a guilty pleasure at best.

And the genius of the show was that it managed to be both – candy-covered appointment television and quality drama that had something to say about our times both past and present.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace has a fair amount to live up to, then, but not as much to prove. Where season one was tackling issues of race, season two wants us to think about sexuality.

If you’ve watched even five minutes of a Ryan Murphy project before, you’ll know that he doesn’t really do ‘subtle’. Nothing with Murphy’s name attached could be described as beige or uninteresting or even unambitious – it’s loud and pointed and deliberate. None of this, of course, is an insult. Murphy’s shows get noticed and get people talking, and The Assassination of Gianni Versace is no different.

Like O.J. Simpson in season one, the murder of Versace is perfect subject matter for what American Crime Story is trying to achieve. By choosing some of the most salacious and tabloid-worthy crimes from history, ACS is allowed to dig deeper into the psychological aspects of those people and events.

Because of the title, you might expect Versace to be the main player here, but he’s merely furniture in the stories of those around him. Without doubt, Darren Criss (as killer Andrew Cunanan) and Penelope Cruz (Donatella Versace) are the stars here, matched by a wonderful set of supporting performances including by not limited to Ricky Martin and Edgar Ramirez.

The first episode sets the scene – Cunanan is an ambitious yet delusional young gay man who becomes obsessed over time with his idol, Gianni Versace. We’re told that this killing isn’t his first, and that his presence on the FBI’s most wanted list did not prevent him from walking around Miami and getting close enough to Versace’s front door to shoot him close range.

Clearly, there’s a story about law enforcement here as well as the ever-fascinating ‘making a murderer’ tale.

While Criss gives a remarkable performance here as a man who just did something both terrifying and thrilling and not sure how to react in a way considered ‘human’, the first hour spends a lot of time establishing the impact of the death on Donatella and Antonio D’Amico (Martin), as they attempt to salvage legacies both private and professional while the wolves descend.

The most disturbing part of any tragedy is the way in which bystanders conduct themselves, here manifesting in amateur photographers selling their photos of the body to the highest bidder, or tourists making sure to smear magazine pages in the blood on the steps of Versace’s home. It’s macabre and, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, totally believable – this is what humanity is, warts and all.

As with the previous season, there is so much more story to tell following the actual murder. The how, when and who of murder isn’t the point, American Crime Story posits, and we should instead be asking why. The why of Andrew Cunanan promises to be a wild ride indeed.

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 1 review

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 1 review: a gossipy, killer slice of docudrama

An aura of decadent fabulousness lingers over The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. The tragic fashion designer is introduced gliding about in a blinding pink dressing gown in his Versailles-like Miami palace – a riot of stucco and sunshine over which director and show-runner Ryan Murphy overlays sonorous opera.

As if inspired by one of Versace’s swirling creations, Murphy wastes no time ratcheting up the overkill to a clanging crescendo in FX’s true crime follow up to 2016’s The People Vs. OJ Simpson.

Gunned down on his doorstep by the psychotic fabulist Andrew Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss), Gianni Versace bleeds to death alongside a bloodied dove similarly, if inexplicably, pierced by a bullet.

Storming on three quarters of the way in as Donatella Versace – Gianni’s beloved sister and heir –  Penélope Cruz adds to the excess with a performance as filthily ridiculous as her dirty blonde wig.  The most delicious aspect of the series, however, is its element of surprise.

Versace (Édgar Ramírez – whose performance is, weirdly, the most sober here) was a global fashion figure when cut down in July 1997 yet the details of his killing are not widely known.

That’s in contrast to the OJ Simpson case, so embedded in our memories that watching Murphy recreate the events two years ago felt like participating in a game of true crime bingo. The Ford Bronco chase, the misogynistic humbling of Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran’s “if glove don’t fit” speech – all were dutifully trotted out, each beat as predictable as the chorus in a Justin Bieber song.

Season two, by contrast, packs a gilded punch. The first episode bounces between the slaying of Versace to his first encounter, in a San Fransisco gay club, with Cunanan. The future killer is a Walter Mitty-like social climber whose life is wallpapered with so many habitual lies it’s unclear whether even he knows truth from fiction. Preppy of manner and soulless of gaze, he gives Murphy something the Simpson case lacked – an unambiguous villain scary even when he isn’t shooting dead international fashion designers.

As Donatella, Cruz meanwhile cuts a furious swathe. She trowels on the accent and affectations quite gleefully: a little thrill is sure to run through you every time she flutters her reptilian eye-lids or pronounces “company” as “kuuumpany” (perhaps unsurprisingly the Versace family have dismissed the series as fantasy).

Even more impressive is pop star Ricky Martin as Gianni’s devastated romantic partner Antonio D’Amico. It’s 1997 in Miami but gay rights are still an evolving concept as made clear when Detective Scrimshaw (Will Chase) casually asks the grieving D’Amico whether, after 15 years together, Versace was paying his lover for services rendered in the bedroom.

Amid the towering chintz and power-house performances, there’s a slight clumsiness to the interweaving of the murder hunt with wrangling over the future of the Versace empire (Donatella wants to delay plans to float the “kuuumpany” on the stock exchange). But the bare facts of the case are so intriguing, the evocation of Nineties Miami so searing, as to paper over the structural clunkiness.

With American Crime Story season two, Murphy has served up another killer slice of documudrama – a lush, gossipy tour de force that dazzles and tantalises in equal measure.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 1 review: a gossipy, killer slice of docudrama

The Assassination Of Gianni Versace, by Jim Shelley

Penelope Cruz’s bizarre portrayal of Donatella and outstanding acting by Ricky Martin were two of the more startling features that stood out in The Assassination Of Gianni Versace.

But, as with The People vs. OJ Simpson the reality the drama was based on was even stranger. The white dove found lying by Versace’s body, also killed in the shooting for example, was a detail the best crime writers couldn’t make up.

There’s one big problem with making a show as universally acclaimed and exactly right for the times as The People vs. OJ Simpson and that’s what do you do next?

The Assassination Of Gianni Versace was not just the perfect follow-up but arguably, amazingly, even better material.

It made similar observations about the downside of celebrity, the appetite of the media, and flawed police procedure and prejudice (sexual this time rather than racial) but was more glamorous, more intriguing, and revealing than the first American Crime Story mini-series – largely because most viewers knew the details of the OJ case/murder (the Ford Bronco chase, the gloves etc) beforehand.

In contrast, this had an assassin few of us knew much about, that (strangely) never became as famous as the likes of Mark Chapman or John Hinckley Jn, despite killing Versace and being wanted by the FBI for four other murders at the time.

Episode One suggested that instead of facts established by a court case and endless analysis in the media, the story here revolves around speculation and ambiguity.

Even the show wasn’t sure we could believe what we were seeing, or saying that we should.

The issue whether Gianni Versace had ever met his killer Andrew Cunanan before their fatal encounter on July 15 1997 is disputed by the designer’s family.

Here though we saw Cunanan approach him seven years earlier in the VIP area of a nightclub in San Francisco and subsequently meet him at the opera he had created the costumes for.

The various versions of how these came about (and whether they did at all) was a product of three sources: the book Vulgar Favours by Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth who supposedly uncovered them; scriptwriter Tom Rob Smith who by the series’ own admission ‘filled in a lot of the blanks involving the relationship between predator and prey’; and anecdotes by Andrew Cunanan himself.

The problem was, as we saw, that Cunanan was an inveterate liar, a pathological fantasist, and seemingly a sociopath – unable to empathise with other people emotionally or understand why telling the truth even mattered.

‘Is it real?’ a friend at Berkeley asked him about the story of meeting Versace.

‘How do you mean?’ frowned Cunanan, genuinely puzzled. ‘Honestly, truthfully, I really do swear I have a date with Gianni Versace !’

Given the lies he’d told about being half-Jewish and his sexuality his friend (like us) found Cunanan’s claims unlikely.

‘You tell gay people you’re gay and straight people you’re straight,’ he pointed out.

‘I tell people what they need to hear !’ countered Cunanan gleefully.

Darren Criss (Blaine Anderson in Glee) was superb portraying Cunanan’s dual personalities: the American Psycho-styled loser with ‘nothing’, consumed by self-hatred, torment over his sexuality, and jealousy of Versace’s lifestyle also able to pass himself as a handsome, camp, student at UC Berkeley and then blend into Miami’s beach scene.

He was wearing a grey t-shirt, shorts, and ordinary orange baseball cap when he walked up to the designer and shot him in broad daylight outside his house on Ocean Drive.

Criss certainly had a whale of time depicting Cunanan’s derangement (mimicking the shocked response of a woman watching Versace’s death on TV, placing his hand over his mouth as she did – except to conceal his glee at the news), not to mention his chilling charm and penchant for elaboration.

‘For my first job I worked for my father on his pineapple plantation in the Philippines ! Can you imagine that?!’ he purred to Versace (supposedly), before claiming his father had also been a pilot for Imelda Marcos and that he was writing a novel about his ‘crazy’ family.

Edgar Ramirez was equally brilliant as Gianni Versace (not to mention eerily similar physically) but the contrast between characters couldn’t have been greater.

Every time Versace spoke about his childhood and his family, his stories were touching and admirable.

His inspiration was his mother’s ethos as a dressmaker and the Versace company logo (the head of Medusa) far from the crass, pretentious, symbol people regarded it but a memory of his childhood playing in Rome’s ruins.

‘For me family is everything,’ Gianni gently explained to Cunanan (again allegedly). ‘The first dress I ever made was for my sister Donatella. Maybe every dress I make is for her.’

Penelope Cruz as Donatella made a late entrance but predictably a drama one, descending from a private plane wearing trademark leather trousers and a huge pair of shades.

When she took them off she didn’t look much like Donatella, or sound like her (or even Italian) when she confronted Gianni’s partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), dismissing his sobbing snapping: ‘that’s not what I need from you right now. You are not to speak about my brother without consulting me first.’

D’Amico had just been grilled by the police – the scene that showed most that the Versace story may lack the resonance of OJ Simpson’s but it still has a striking relevance to modern-day politics/prejudice.

Asking about the lovers and one-night stands Antonio arranged for Versace, one FBI officer wondered: ‘did they consider themselves to be his partner too? Do you see why I’m confused? What’s the difference?’

‘I lived with Gianni for 15 years. I was his companion not his pimp !’ D’Amico wept. ‘It’s a good length of time,’ conceded the Fed. ‘Were you paid?’

Cruz came into her own when Donatella declared she was cancelling her brother’s plan to float Versace on the New York stock exchange and intending to keep it in the family.

‘Gianni grew his company from one small store in Milan, from a single rack of clothes, a little simple bench,’ she reiterated to their lawyers. ‘This company was his life. My brother is still alive as long as Versace is alive. I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice.’

Admittedly her words (and her accent) were more reminiscent of a woman announcing she was taking over South American drug cartel than the heir to an Italian fashion empire.

Everything about her portrayal of Donatella right down to the styling was suitably flamboyant without ever necessarily being completely convincing.

But even this was a reason to watch, to see how it/she progresses, and part of what made The Assassination of Gianni Versace as mesmerising as its predecessor about OJ.

The Assassination Of Gianni Versace, by Jim Shelley

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: ‘A new American Psycho’

On paper, a script based on the dramatic murder of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997, set in perma-tanned Miami and with a cast including Ricky Martin and Penelope Cruz, might sound like a recipe for the biggest slice of cheesecake melodrama you will get to see all year. Not that there’s anything wrong with cheesecake melodrama. From Dynasty to Nashville, when US dramas borrow the high-octane emotion of Latin American telenovelas and mix it up with cinematic opulence, it can be alchemised into TV gold.

You saw it glittering when Penelope Cruz, playing sister Donatella, magnificent in a peroxide blonde wig and skin-tight black leather, clomping around in high heels with the thuggish gait of bruiser in Doctor Martens, addresses a shadowy looking board room hours after Gianni has been shot dead outside his Miami palace by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. “I will not allow that man to kill my brother twice,” she hisses.

The Spanish actress doesn’t make much of an attempt to pretend she’s Italian – sniggering perhaps at English-speakers conception that they all sound the same and when all the Americans pronounce her brother’s name as ‘Johnny’. As a consequence, she reminds you of her wonderful she was in the same late 90s period in the films of Pedro Almodovar. Ricky Martin turns out to be a revelation as Gianni’s partner, vilified and shut out by both family and the police.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is not just an excuse for some great fashion and Latin passion though but a real horrific tragedy, overshadowed in history by the death of Princess Diana only a month later. Edgar Ramirez gives Versace a poetic tenderness that makes you feel the senseless waste and brutality of his murder. But it’s Darren Criss who steals the show as the real American Psycho (with plenty of nods to the Mary Harron’s film) dissembling and deceiving with alarming ease, dancing to Phil Collins, his eyes flashing behind his preppy glasses.

The first American Crime Story series, The People v O. J. Simpson combined ersatz performances with an acute dissection of the growing fault lines in American society over race and the power of celebrity.

The second series suggests there will be similar analysis of how painfully and dangerously closeted homosexuality was and how glamour and money circulates and distorts passions like drugs. But without a long court case, the exploration this time seems more psychological than sociological – what drove Cunanon to kill Versace? Did he know him? The confabulation of fact and possible fiction and glamorisation of Cunanan, despite the beauty and drama, might make this slice of real life harder to swallow.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: ‘A new American Psycho’

The Assassination of Gianni Versace review – Ryan Murphy’s fashion fable is flawed but fab guilty pleasure

The mood and effect of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is best exemplified by the fact that, when his boyfriend of 15 years, Antonio D’Amico, hears gunshots and races to find his dying lover riddled with bullets and bleeding upon the steps of Casa Casuarina, their Xanadu-like villa, you don’t think: “Oh, sweet fragility of life! Oh, the endless evil that man will visit upon man! But playthings to the gods are we!” You think: “Ooh, that’s Ricky Martin! In tennis whites! Isn’t he ageing well?”

Which is to say that, in the opening episode at least, the soapy sensibility of Ryan Murphy, the show’s creator, has some emotional distance to close between the subject and its viewers. There’s also the inescapable high camp elements of the story of the Italian fashion designer’s murder, with which series two of Murphy’s pop culture anthology is concerned. It’s not helped by a weirdly clunky script that has the murderer, Andrew Cunanan, disgorging great lumps of exposition that pop the narrative bubbles we would otherwise be chasing after. On the other hand, maybe it’s not a problem at all. Maybe keeping us at a distance is as knowing and deliberate an artistic decision as Versace’s every design choice in Casa Casuarina.

Like Murphy’s first and Bafta-winning American Crime Story, The People vs OJ Simpson, The Assassination is at least in part a commentary on the lenses in front of which a febrile piece of social history played out. When Cucanan’s bullets first met their mark in real life, the reaction from the public was, after all, just as shorn of genuine sorrow. A brand has been shot! Look, there’s Donatella arriving! And Diana and Naomi crying at the funeral! It was only ever deliciously unreal to us.

The nine-part series opens with the murder and the first 50-minute episode flashes back and forth from there to 1990, interleaving the evolution of Cununan’s obsession with his victim and the development of the murder investigation. Cunanan is played by Darren Criss, who is a touch stagey. But Criss was a fine turn as Blaine Anderson in Glee, and hopefully he will find his groove over the next eight episodes.

Edgar Ramirez as Versace does wonders with his part, managing to evoke the man’s fabled charm and a sort of commanding gentleness that explains why so many clients were drawn to him, and how he built a tiny Milan shop with a single rack of clothes into a billion pound fashion house.

Quite what is fact and quite what is fiction is never clear. Donatella et al have disowned the series as “a work of fiction”. The programme itself carries the disclaimer: “Some events are combined or imagined for dramatic and interpretative purposes. Dialogue is imagined to be consistent with these events.”

It is entirely in keeping with the genre that it is the bits that you are most sure are made up that are actually true. A fragment of one of the bullets that killed Versace also hit a dove and brought it down next to him. The police had failed to distribute the posters advertising Cunanan – who had killed four men in six months before Versace – as one the FBI’s 10 most wanted. And if the fact that a bystander ran to his car to get his Polaroid camera to capture the dying man’s body being loaded into the ambulance doesn’t seem stranger than fiction now, children of the smartphone world, let me assure you it did then.

Having looked a little ahead at the series, it does begin to thicken and deepen. You don’t need to feel too guilty about what promises to be a glorious and, given its central subject, eminently unjustifiable pleasure.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace review – Ryan Murphy’s fashion fable is flawed but fab guilty pleasure