Tag: february 2018

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

A Little Less Spree Killing, A Little More Coffee and Contemplation

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on FX at 10:00pm ET. I thought this week was the last episode, but it’s the penultimate episode. I’ve really been missing Edgar Ramirez’s Versace the last few episodes, so I hope there’s more time with him in the last couple episodes. Darren Criss is doing an excellent job playing a spiraling narcissistic psychopath, but it’s also driving me straight up a wall watching him. Seeing Ramirez’s kind, calm, and focused Versace would be a nice change of pace.

A Little Less Spree Killing, A Little More Coffee and Contemplation

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