Tag: review

Fashion Recap: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Episode 1

Alore! It’s here: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premiered Wednesday night, whetting our palates for all things gaudy, neon, and of course, Italian. Below, a close reading of every look.

High Versus Low

Episode one begins with Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) opening his eyes to carpe diem. He slides his feet into his Versace slippers, struts down the hallway of his (actual) Miami mansion in Versace silk pajama bottoms, and dons a flowing, hot pink robe before stepping out onto a balcony to survey his kingdom. Everything is easy, breezy, beautiful.

Meanwhile, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) sits perched on a public beach below, looking out over the ocean with a scowl. He opens up his backpack, casually pulling out his only two possessions: a worn copy of The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast, and then a gun.

These first few vignettes set up Versace and Cunanan in stark contrast. Versace eats fresh fruit handed to him on a Versace-branded platter; Cunanan chugs a soda for breakfast. Versace wears linen shorts and a Versace Medusa logo tee; Cunanan wears sandy jorts and a nondescript gray shirt. Versace buys a copy of Vanity Fair, (Cunanan’s favorite magazine) featuring Princess Diana, who would later attend Versace’s funeral; Cunanan studies Condé Nast from afar.

When the Lights Go Down, We’re All the Same

The show works backwards, starting with Versace’s murder and then flashing back to 1990, when Cunanan first meets Versace in San Francisco. (In real life, the Versace family denies they ever met.) At the time, Versace was in town designing costumes for Capriccio, an opera. Cunanan enters a crowded nightclub wearing a leather jacket and a printed shirt, which looks like a Versace knockoff that’s faded in the sun. “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” plays (ironically) as a crowd in tank tops and ass-less chaps dances to the music. Cunanan spots Versace, who is wearing a leather top far more polished than his, sitting in the VIP section. He makes a point to start a conversation, and succeeds in winning Versace’s attention.

The next morning, Cunanan tells the story of his encounter with Versace to his friend-slash-roommate Lizzie and her husband, embellishing the details a bit. One line in particular comes straight from Maureen Orth’s reporting, on which the series is based: “I say to him, ‘Honey, if you’re Versace, I’m Coco Chanel!” Of course, Cunanan knows he is, in fact, Versace. And in his mind, he fancies himself a bit of a Chanel.

“I’m not really a fan of his clothes, per se,” Cunanan continues. “It’s so bright; it’s too much. They say Armani designs clothes for wives; I think Versace designs clothes for sluts.” Despite all this, Versace has invited Cunanan to the opera. Obviously, he’s going.

Master of Disguise

When the big night comes, Lizzie returns home from work to find Cunanan wearing her husband’s suit, tie, and loafers. “I have nothing,” Cunanan says, explaining he wants to look “impressive.” Lizzie ultimately pities him, and lets him borrow her husband’s gold watch, too.

“[Cunanan’s] whole thing was being a master of disguise,” says costume designer, Lou Eyrich. “He was a chameleon. If he wanted to be in the rich world of older men, he dressed that part. If he wanted to fit in with his college buddies, he’d throw on his polo shirt and khaki shorts. He was straight with straight people and gay with gay people. Everything was a lie, and he lived behind that whole façade.”

After the opera, Versace meets Cunanan wearing a humble black turtleneck and black pants. Cunanan spins fictitious tales about his family, while Versace recounts more innocent stories about his idyllic childhood, explaining the origins of the Versace Medusa logo — he came across it while playing around in ancient ruins — and that he made his first dress for his sister, Donatella. “Maybe every dress I make is for her,” he says.

“That makes me want to cry,” says Cunanan.

Boss Bella

Flash back to the scene of the crime. Donatella (Penélope Cruz) arrives in a black limousine wearing black leather pants, a black leather blazer, and black sunglasses, making her signature blonde hair (Gianni convinced her to dye it) appear even more platinum. Despite her obvious grieving, she immediately gets down to business. Protecting her brother’s legacy is her number-one priority, and Versace was about to take the company public. (This was true in reality.) Donatella decides against it.

“This company was his life,” Donatella says in a tearful monologue. “When he was sad, it made him happy. When he was sick, it kept him alive. And my brother is still alive as long as Versace is alive. I will not allow that man — that nobody — to kill my brother twice.”

Revenge Suit

The episode ends with Versace and Cunanan’s roles reversed. While the Versace mansion is shrouded in darkness, Cunanan walks down the streets of Miami in plain sight wearing a sunny yellow monochrome outfit and Versace sunglasses. He buys a stack of newspapers with his name inside their pages this time, exactly as Versace did minutes before he was shot.

“Ryan [Murphy] wanted him to have this Talented Mr. Ripley moment, where he’s gotten away with murder,” says Eyrich. “You don’t know it from the first episode — because you’re going back in time — but it’s not until you watch that you understand why that [outfit] was significant.”

Stay tuned.

Fashion Recap: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Episode 1

A powerful dramatisation of the murder of Gianni Versace

The 20th century may be considered America’s greatest, but gay men had a miserable time. Sodomy was a felony in every state until 1962, and it remained illegal in 13 states until 2003. Gay men were sacked from jobs in government and left to die in an epidemic many considered a punishment for their “sinful” behaviour. They were hounded out of bars, the only public places they could be themselves. They were beaten and arrested by gangs of untouchable police (the same tactics are used today in many of the 72 countries that continue to criminalise homosexuality). In short, gay men were kept out of the portrait of American society.

Towards the end of the century, however, times were changing. The picture of acceptable America had expanded to include, even celebrate, some gay men. In particular Gianni Versace, a fashion designer from Italy, was able to let gay stigma slip like a silk gown to the floor. He had grown a business from a single boutique in Milan to a global fashion label—an Italian-American dream. He had good looks, money and a palace with an ocean view in Miami. Tourists stopped outside to snap photos to say they had stood where the great man lived.

But on the morning of July 15th 1997, as Versace returned from his morning walk, Andrew Cunanan approached him on the steps of his mansion and shot him in the head with a semi-automatic pistol. The murder was a sensation, and the tragic story is now portrayed in “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace”. Like the previous season, which dramatised the racially charged trial of O.J. Simpson, an NFL player accused of two counts of murder, the show takes on cultural issues. It explores the standing of gay men in America through the twisted pathology of Cunanan, who killed five men on a three-month spree in 1997, including men who, like himself, had sex with other men. The series was written by Tom Rob Smith, based on a book by Maureen Orth, a journalist, and some creative liberties have inevitably been taken (the Versace family have distanced themselves from the show, calling it a “work of fiction”). By probing Cunanan’s sense of entitlement but also the stigma around his sexuality, the story shows how America’s prejudices endured despite the giddy heights of a few golden boys such as Versace.

What makes the show terribly watchable is seeing Cunanan’s rage form (Darren Criss’s thrilling performance, pictured, both seduces and terrifies the viewer). As something of a nobody, Cunanan is drawn to the idea of power, and the powerful; he wastes no time in penetrating loftier circles. One victim was the traditional picture of American success: a real-estate tycoon, married with a son, living in a big house. Cunanan achieves his own kind of success, of course—but only by committing horrific crimes. He doesn’t have the cynicism of Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho”, but he similarly penetrates the glassy penthouses of capitalism and hacks their residents to death.

Cunanan’s crimes are also seemingly designed to subvert traditional family values. It is not just that he sleeps with and murders married men. In one episode he murders a love rival, claims the boyfriend and then pops out to walk the dog with him. In trying to appear normal despite having left a body bleeding out at home, their stroll becomes an unnerving parody of a domestic situation gay men were often denied. Before he kills Versace in the show, Cunanan boasts of men who have proposed to him. He is delusional—the stories are probably lies, but even if they are true he does not acknowledge that gay marriage is legally impossible.

These different spheres of private experience are evident again when Donatella Versace bitterly asks Antonio, Gianni’s bereaved partner, what he gave her brother. “Stability? Safety? Children?” she spits. “You’ve given him nothing.” With far more grace than Donatella—who is supposed to be the one with style and elegance—Antonio says: “We’re not allowed.” Nor do police officers understand the sanctity of the relationship. When Antonio describes how other partners were occasionally welcome, one cop cocks an eyebrow. If being gay doesn’t throw the cop’s suspicion on Antonio, being promiscuous does.

Perhaps the most important influence on Cunanan’s behaviour is his sexuality. Cunanan does not always deny that he sleeps with men (“I tell people what they want to hear,” he informs a friend), but he is clearly troubled by the dominance of heterosexuality and the shame of his own sexual subversions. “I want the world to know you’re a sissy,” he hisses at one married man he sells sex to. His sexual practices are of the dangerous and kinky kind that exemplified moral panics towards gay people. While Cunanan was on the run, the press speculated that his rampage was a reaction against being diagnosed as HIV-positive (he was not). Nineteen years later, in the aftermath of the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando by Omar Mateen, the press speculated that his motive, too, was revenge for discovering that a male partner had HIV.

Cunanan did not choose to rage on behalf of the gay men beaten by police, those made homeless by their families or those failed by the government. It is thought he suffered from a personality disorder, but Mr Smith knows that the 20th century’s treatment of gay men provided the parameters for its expression. This eight-part series is as unsettling as it is alluring; in considering the overlapping spheres of disenfranchisement and violence, “American Crime Story” acts as a warning.

A powerful dramatisation of the murder of Gianni Versace

What Are We Getting Out of Prestige True Crime?

This much has already been said about The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which premiered on FX on Wednesday night: It is notreally about Gianni Versace. It’s not even predominantly about the aftermath of his assassination. Instead, the show should be named after the magazine article from which it came: “The Killer’s Trail” by Maureen Orth, published in Vanity Fair in 1997 (and which became her book Vulgar Favors). “The Killer’s Trail” would be the most literal descriptor for Versace: ACS, an unrelenting, nearly murder-an-episode, sleek slaughterfest that is actually about Andrew Cunanan, Versace’s murderer.

Ryan Murphy’s latest American Crime Story installment does begin with Gianni Versace, who was gunned down by Cunanan in front of his Miami mansion in 1997. But the anthology series is much more about the four murders committed by Cunanan in the two months he spent on the run preceding that act. Cunanan—an equal parts charismatic and off-putting poseur who crafted outlandish stories about himself and his family for the better part of his life; a gay man who traveled in some of the highest and lowest echelons of closeted, clandestine, and out society during the years of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—is a fascinating, gruesome figure. Orth had plenty of material for her exhaustive book about him. So why is this show named for Versace?

I’m willing to posit that it’s because, along with a recent crop of similar television shows and films we could call “prestige true crime,” ACS: Versace doesn’t want to admit what it really is. For one thing, like its predecessor The People v. O.J. Simpson, the show arrives amid a glut of ’90s nostalgia, glammed-up with Day-Glo fashion, questionable hairstyles, and beloved dance beats, as if to staunch the spilled blood with spandex and hairspray. Content creators, we’ll call them, since these productions are available streaming, airing weekly, or playing at the movie theater, have struck gold with crime stories from the ’90s, catering to millennials who were too young to really understand them, and to those older who are eager to relive the era they personified. ACS: Versace is part of the explosion of a centuries-old genre that used to be synonymous with trash, or pulp, and has now, by trend and circumstance, been elevated to prestige entertainment, where it bleeds onto our screens small and large.

True crime has always been about details, about feeding a streak of voyeurism with any and all facts about a past case (think of all the Murderpedia-type sites online, and their Reddit offshoots for discussing endless theories and motives). Of course, the more unbelievable the details the better, which means that the most notorious crimes catch the most attention. Serial killers, like Cunanan, provide multiple crime scenes and victims to pore over; sensational incidents with no resolution, like the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, can provide fixation forever; and crimes involving attractive young women, like Amanda Knox’s indictment, imprisonment, and release for the slaying of Meredith Kercher, invite ample opportunities for lurid dime-store analysis.

It’s not difficult to see why Andrew Cunanan’s story gripped the country in 1997, when he ended his murder spree by shooting Versace and, eventually, himself in the head, and why it would titillate any true crime fan today. ACS: Versace does nearly the deepest dive it possibly could on the murderer’s life over eight episodes: from his childhood in La Jolla, California, with a grifter father who left his wife and four children destitute when his job as a stockbroker turned to embezzling; through years drifting through gay scenes in San Francisco and San Diego, where he cultivated a series of older men who paid for a lavish if precarious lifestyle, and eventually—whether due to being dumped by his last rich boyfriend, or the fact that two of his former friends moved away to the same city (and thus on without him)—to his development into a homicidal sociopath. He traveled to Minneapolis and killed his old friends there, followed by another wealthy older gentleman in Chicago, a cemetery caretaker whose car he needed in New Jersey, and, finally, Versace in Miami; but not before living there, undetected by police for weeks, watching his name appear in headlines all over the world.

Yet, despite having all the hallmarks of true crime, ACS: Versace’s showrunners, its marketing campaign, and the industry buzz surrounding it are trying to sell it as something bigger—instead of the low-down, dirty details, of which there is an abundance, Murphy et al want us to know that they are speaking to much larger issues in their work, primarily homophobia, even feminism, which Murphy has attached to Gianni’s sister Donatella Versace. This rhetoric has heightened as the Versace family has come out staunchly against the production, and Murphy, as well as stars Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin, have had to defend the show’s existence and its splashy rollout.

Screenwriter Tom Rob Smith has said ACS: Versace’s purpose is “supporting a bigger truth,” which is “celebrating Versace.” “We are exploring why he was a genius,” he told Variety, “why he was important, the impact that he made, and why it was such a loss when he was murdered—both on a personal level in terms of all the people that loved him, all the people that admired him, and on a cultural level as well. It’s a show that celebrates and admires him.” This is true to the extent that the iconic designer is portrayed with empathy by Edgar Ramirez (though his estate disputes several details of the show, including his health status), but he is only central to the show in the first few episodes. In many of them, he barely features at all; one early, pivotal scene with Versace and Cunanan, a date at the San Francisco Opera, was the invention of screenwriters. Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s lover, Antonio D’Amico, told Vanity Fair, “We’re not making a photo; we’re making a painting. We add color, etc.” But compared to Cunanan, in an eerie and meticulous performance by Glee’s Darren Criss, whose sadistic murders are punishingly graphic, everyone else is shades of gray.

We don’t have to hold all creative works about real-life suffering to the standards of what would hurt or offend surviving family members, but after watching a fictional Cunanan—whose real-life counterpart craved perhaps nothing so much as the type of fame bestowed by a prestige TV series—sadistically torture and humiliate his victims in fine detail, it’s hard not to feel like maybe we should.

…

There is a difference between the hundreds of Investigation Discovery recreations or Lifetime Movie Channel films dedicated to unspeakably brutal crimes and American Crime Story: Versace; I, Tonya; the soapy The Menendez Murders and their ilk. One crop I’m writing about and the other I’m not, and probably would never. The marks of prestige—lots of money, lavish sets, tons of marketing, huge stars, discussions of America, fame, power, and sex, and, the big one, “the truth”—give these works weight that they don’t always deserve. And, wrapped up in all of it, we forget that there are people out there to whom some of these horrible events really happened, and who are not making money or winning awards for reliving them.

It’s getting difficult to separate these entertainers from the flocks of vultures they depict. The particularly despicable one that stuck out to me in ACS: Versace was a woman who, cordoned outside of the designer’s mansion where his body is lying on the steps, rips out one of his ads from a magazine. As she breaks the police line, you think she might be running up to place it beside Versace, as a kind of benediction; instead, she uses the paper to soak up his blood, holding it above her head like a trophy.

What Are We Getting Out of Prestige True Crime?

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THE BLOTTER PRESENTS PODCASTS: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story And The Chad Boushell Interview

American Crime Story returns after a triumphant first season with an all-new mid-nineties crime, and Tara Ariano returns to discuss it, and whether, after 20 years, we should accept that sometimes there is no “why.” We’ll also be discussing whether Sarah’s the only one who thinks Édgar Ramirez as Versace looks AND sounds like Enrico Colantoni; if it’s appropriate to covet a character’s clothing if that character is a spree killer; and the question of The Nose in Penelope Cruz’s portrayal of Donatella.

In our Cold Case section, Sarah sits down with Chad Boushell – the unlucky Rob McKernan in the Bride Killa ep we looked at for Episode 39 – to ask what’s the hardest thing about playing the body, and the responsibility actors feel to real victims.

Let’s Talk About ’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace:’ Premiere

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story just finished airing its first episode. If you read the review I published on Monday, you know I had much more mixed feelings about this season than People v O.J. Simpson, so let’s get into a few specifics about the premiere, coming up just as soon as I work on my father’s pineapple plantation in the Phillipines…

“I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day.” –Gianni

Of the eight episodes FX gave critics in advance, “The Man Who Was Vogue” is the one that most closely resembles many of the things that people loved about the OJ season. Though Gianni Versace gets shot before the opening titles appear, the San Francisco flashback and the arrival of Donatella to deal with the aftermath of her brother’s murder keep the hour relatively balanced between the Versaces and Andrew Cunanan. There’s an abundance of garish real-life details, like the guy who tried to auction off a photo of Versace’s body on the gurney and the autograph hounds who scooped some of Versace’s blood into a bag. And via the manhunt for Cunanan and the interactions between the local cops and the FBI agents, we start to get a sense of how badly law-enforcement blew this one, just like the OJ prosecutors did.

Let’s Talk About ’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace:’ Premiere

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is Very Different From OJ

At the time it was announced that Ryan Murphy’s next project at FX would be The People v. O.J. Simpson, the pairing between creator and subject matter seemed like a surefire disaster in the making. The idea of matching Murphy’s interests and tendency toward gaudy excess with an infamous murder trial, and what the tabloid-y media storm surrounding it said about race, celebrity culture, and America in general, was enough to make even the most optimistic television viewer skeptical. Then the show premiered and proved its doubters wrong. It garnered critical acclaim, huge ratings for the network, won multiple Emmys, and turned Sterling K. Brown into a certified star. The result, then, was that, despite certain evidence to the contrary, Murphy’s television empire was indeed up to the task of creating a compelling drama from an incendiary and overexposed event in the country’s recent past.

The downside to proving Murphy’s naysayers wrong in this way was made evident by the unique challenge that arose with regard to deciding the topic of the anthology’s follow-up. The question of how to make a successful second season that was also about something and not just a synthesis of the high points achieved by The People v. O.J. was one that seemed to stymie the series to a certain degree. Which is why we’re all watching The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story instead of Katrina: American Crime Story.

To that end, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is fascinating for just how different a product it is than its predecessor. Those differences do, in some ways, make it inferior to The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. But, at the same time, the manner in which the new season succeeds is evidence of how the series can, with the help of the right creative people, continue to disprove its doubters and perhaps take even bigger swings with subsequent seasons, tackling similarly provocative stories and dramatizing them without first having to reassure its potential viewing audience that it has things under control.

The series offers a new sensation from the get-go; it’s one that speaks to the nature of the crime and the way in which the sensational aspects of the designer’s death and personal life were examined in the aftermath of the shooting outside his home in Miami. It also speaks to how, unlike O.J.,the story of Gianni Versace’s murder at the hands of spree killer Andrew Cunanan isn’t nearly as fixed in the country’s collective memory. As such, it doesn’t carry with it the same cultural caché. The Versace murder and subsequent manhunt for his killer didn’t unfold in real-time on our television screens in the same grossly captivating manner. There was an investigation certainly, but that transpired without creating indelible moments like the low-speed pursuit of a White Bronco driven by Al Cowlings or the circus-like atmosphere of Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom.

It is worth noting that, for the average viewer, there is probably going to be a dearth of recognizable characters in this story, too. Without an O.J. Simpson, Al Cowlings, Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, or Robert Kardashian to pin the audience’s attention to, the new season becomes entirely reliant on the victim. That’s to The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s benefit, as series writer Tom Rob Smith (London Spy) points out early on, the same was true when the investigation into the murder began: The name “Versace” was to many people the brand name associated with a brand of jeans instead of an admired, famous, wealthy, and out gay man in Miami, Florida in the late ‘90s.

After a somewhat muddled first episode directed by Murphy, the series begins a more successful examination of identity and, of all things, branding, primarily through a fascinatingly abstruse narrative structure that moves backwards and forwards in time. The series begins with the actual assassination, and, like O.J., that act of violence becomes the inciting incident of the main story. But, strangely enough, as plotted by Smith, it’s not the inciting incident of Cunanan’s interaction with Versace, nor is it the beginning of their individual narratives. Instead, it acts more like a crossroads where two divergent story lines briefly and tragically meet before continuing to fork in opposite directions.

The almost dreamlike composition of the narrative affords the series the room it needs to breathe. That’s especially true since, at the end of the first episode, you may well be left wondering how in the hell The Assassination of Gianni Versace plans to stretch this story out for another eight hours. The plan, it seems, is to move back and forth between the past and present of several of individuals, including Cunanan, Gianni Versace and his sister Donatella, his lover Antonio D’Amico, and the police and FBI in the midst of a manhunt. Those individuals are brought to life through some terrific performances; in particular Darren Criss’ standout role as Cunanan and Penelope Cruz’ tremendous performance as Donatella Versace. Édgar Ramírez is also strong as Gianni, disappearing almost entirely into the role with the help of some thinning hair and makeup.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is a remarkably different follow-up to one of FX’s most successful productions, one that, given how different the crime, its victim, perpetrator, and those impacted are, feels appropriate. Though it doesn’t seem to know exactly what it is and what it’s trying to say beyond the circumstances of the crime in question during its first hour, it does develop into something far more intricate and interesting as the series moves forward.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is Very Different From OJ

American Crime Story’s Season Opener Beautifully Mines the Tension of Knowing What’s Coming

Rating: 8.9

A man in flowing pajamas ambles through an obscenely opulent villa, murmuring thanks to the silent servant waiting to hand him his orange juice. Nearby, on the beach, another man restlessly unpacks and repacks a backpack containing a biography and a gun.

The first man has breakfast on a patio inlaid with a faux-ancient mosaic of Medusa’s head. The other man vomits in a public restroom whose cubicle wall is etched with a crude drawing of two penises and an exclamation about “faggots.” In a few minutes, fashion designer Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) will be shot twice in the head on the steps of his mansion and Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) will be giggling hysterically in the driver’s seat of a parked truck.

Miami Beach, July 1997.

It’s a weird kind of tension, when a director spools out minute after minute of lead-up to something we already know will happen because we remember that it happened. (In case we didn’t remember it, it’s the title of the show.) The pre-credit sequence of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is wall-to-wall opulence, in its color saturation, its swelling music, its luxuriant pacing. The tension of knowing what’s coming is sometimes even worse than the tension of not being sure.

Once Versace is shot, the show starts going forward, into the investigation, but more significantly, backward, taking us to a 1990 episode in which Cunanan meets Versace in a gay nightclub and manages to score an invitation to the San Francisco Opera, where Versace is pulling a costume design stint. It’s immediately clear that Cunanan is a DSM-worthy example of a sociopath; even his handful of friends seem to get that he’s a pathological liar. Cunanan meets Versace after the performance, they drink Champagne, and Versace possibly ensures his own future demise by assuring Cunanan he will almost certainly “be important one day.”

Meanwhile, in 1997, the police show up and question Versace’s partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin). They seem very hung up on the fact that “other men” were invited home with the couple. It’s confusing, this “gay lifestyle” thing, apparently even in Miami Beach three years from the turn of the millennium. Were they all his “partner”? No? What’s the difference?

“Fifteen years,” Antonio says incredulously, still wearing blood-stained tennis whites, “I lived with Gianni 15 years. That’s the difference.”

The detective concedes that 15 years is a significant amount of time. Somehow they’re not running a particularly effective investigation, though. The FBI shows up, saying they suspect Cunanan. A pawn shop operator (Cathy Moriarty) calls the police to say she’d turned in paperwork days ago from a transaction with Cunanan, and gives them an address.

Versace’s sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz), shows up, cancels the company’s public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and says they have to keep things in the family because strangers will “judge the killer, but they will also judge the victim.” She rakes poor Antonio over the coals a few times for good measure.

Police storm the address they’ve gotten from the pawn shop, but the man in the seedy hotel room isn’t Cunanan. They’ve lost him.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is, in its opening episode, richly detailed and quite subtle. I don’t love Cruz as Donatella Versace—was Lady Gaga busy?—but then again, the real Donatella creeps me out, too. Criss, Ramirez and Martin are remarkably good, though. The episode brims with strange tensions, between wealth and non-wealth, status and non-status, and between straight and gay cultures. The 1990 scenes are tinted by the AIDS crisis in a way that feels very authentic and not at all ham-fisted. The spooling out of backstory is occasionally imperfect (usually in expository monologues, not generally in real-time scenes). The 1997 scenes have a real-feeling paparazzi-prurience, evoking our often morbid obsession with celebrity and our often subverted fear of Other-ness. (In one horrible moment, a chubby tourist breaches the police line to soak a Versace magazine ad in the blood still pooled on the steps of the villa.) The time-hopping will, I expect, continue, showing us visions of how both men, killer and killed, became who they were.

We appear to be setting up for a beautifully filmed, opulently styled investigation of self-acceptance, self-loathing, rage and unfulfilled desire. When I Googled Gianni Versace to make sure I had his death date correct, this quote floated up at me: “I am not interested in the past, except as a road to the future.”

I think it’s safe to say we’re going to be on a season-long road to the future.

American Crime Story’s Season Opener Beautifully Mines the Tension of Knowing What’s Coming

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 Flawed Beauty of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace tries to test the viewer’s appetite for classical beauty. In long, slow, largely wordless sequences, Ryan Murphy’s camera pans over the ornate tiling of the Versace villa, over the sun-kissed pastel facades of ’90s Miami Beach, and over the speedo-clad bodies that inhabited both. The lens will swoop and dive through a cavernous club populated by shirtless men in angel wings, or it will hover, gnat-like, right up against Penélope Cruz’s face. Often, in these moments, the sound of opera plays.

The follow-up to 2016’s award-and-acclaim-and-audience-winning The People v. O.J. Simpson spirals out from the 1997 morning when the designer Gianni Versace was gunned down by a serial killer and escort named Andrew Cunanan. Versace, we’re told early on by his sister Donatella (Cruz), had “a weakness for beauty.” The show is clearly hoping that audiences will share that stereotypically Italian trait as it channels Federico Fellini and The Godfather. Murphy is more of a workman than a high artist, though, and his meanderings here muddle an intrinsically strange, socially resonant story.

There are indeed some pungent visuals, including when Versace’s lacquered coffin is licked by the flames of an incinerator, and when a procedural police interview is made surreal by an outrageous backdrop. Yet Murphy’s wide-ranging catalogue (Glee, American Horror Story, The Normal Heart) has been more defined by the grotesque than by the gorgeous, and his methods often feel cheap. Whether with chalkboard-scratch strings overused to inject suspense, or with scene-dominating monologues spewing out exposition, he leans on the tricks of industrialized TV to a deadening extent. Last year, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope showcased a truer episodic tribute to baroque (and yes, Italian) sensibility: forceful, hypnotic, uncompromising. By contrast, Murphy’s lavishly decorated wall dressings feels like, well, wall dressing.

Which means the viewer might zonk out before getting to the good stuff. Murphy’s grand ambitions extend to not only surfaces but also structure, and the show threads together pre-murder and post-murder timelines as well as a multiplicity of points of view. Occasionally this is confusing—especially because Cunanan was hunted by the cops both before and after the shooting. But by the end of the second episode, the rhythms of the show make themselves clear, and the audience should be able to lock in.

The Versace household itself, even when depicted before the tragedy, provides plenty of intrigue. Murphy—ever-gawking at the human instinct to gawk—dramatizes the public fascination with the opulence Versace created, the sensibility clash between designer siblings (Gianni and Donatella), and the supposed salaciousness of a powerful gay man’s lifestyle in a less tolerant era. As Gianni lay dying on the steps of his villa, according to the show, one passerby ran to snap a polaroid and then auctioned it off to the media. Another bystander did something even more crass.

Ricky Martin’s performance as Antonio D’Amico, Gianni’s romantic partner of 15 years, is stiff but believable enough. The cops and the show take a somewhat leering interest in the question of whether his character was exploiting Versace while turning their home into a revolving sex salon, or if he was simply, lovingly, helping to fulfill the designer’s desires. Cruz’s Donatella doesn’t arrive until late in the first episode, but when she does it brings a much-needed note of contrast. She’s hard-minded where D’Amico is emotional, swathed in black amid her brother’s multi-hued garden.

Darren Criss’s Cunanan is positioned as a monster conman in a rich American lineage that includes Patrick Bateman and Donald Trump. He lies insistently, enthusiastically, and imaginatively, and even though he’s evading attention from viewers of the FBI mouthpiece America’s Most Wanted, he simultaneously brags that he’s “the person least likely to be forgotten.” As a killer prostitute, the character offers the means through which Murphy can indulge his American Horror Story side to explore how the closet can enable atrocities. While the show plays coy about Cunanan’s motivations, you get a sense that gnawing shame and a need for validation helped create him—and that he knew how his pretty face afforded him a measure of social armor.

But smartly, Murphy reserves a lot of empathy for the character who might have stood in as the bigger symbol of surface worship, Gianni Versace himself. His family has disavowed the series, based on Maureen Orth’s 1999 book Vulgar Favors, as tawdry and inaccurate. Yet the murder victim is played with real gentleness and sensitivity by Édgar Ramírez, who also nails Versace’s physical look. It’s not prettiness itself that motivated his work, we’re told, but family, loyalty, and a desire to serve. Getting the most out of American Crime Story will similarly mean looking past the frescoes and fabrics to the plight of people whose ken for beauty fascinated a sick man and—Murphy argues—a sick society.

The Flawed Beauty of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

American Crime Story: Versace Is Pure Miami, Whether You Like It or Not

Murphy understands that Miami is as gaudy, gay, and greedy as the characters he’s put onscreen. Yes, we certainly have more depth than that (as numerous films, from the Oscar-winning Moonlight to Borscht Corp’s award-winning shorts, have shown). But the surface-level charm is prevalent, often hiding that depth from outsiders. In Versace, Murphy leans deeply into the façade.

Still, Versace, like Miami, seems to promise more than surface-level charms. It’s not just the gorgeous visuals or Penélope Cruz playing Donatella Versace without attempting to hide her Spanish accent. It’s not just Édgar Ramírez working on beautiful Versace costumes for an opera or having his shirt logo sliced open on a hospital table in the most heavy-handed death scene ever. And it’s not just Ricky Martin as Antonio D’Amico wailing for an ambulance while holding his dying lover as though they were Michelangelo’s Pietà. Versace writer Tom Rob Smith has used Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U. S. History as a jumping-off point to create a portrait of this place that’s as loving and as critical as it should be.

The beauty of the pilot episode is in the details, its slow but smart establishing of the period we’re entering. This is the queer ‘90s: There’s sex, nightlife, and drugs. There’s also an AIDS epidemic that people still had no real clue how to deal with. It’s implied in scenes showing Versace pulling up his robe to reveal a lesion and taking medication that he was dealing with AIDS. That unease buzzes beneath scenes in which a police officer can barely communicate with D’Amico during questioning because he can’t grasp the concept of two men dating, much less two men in an open relationship. It’s in the word “faggot” written on a public beach bathroom wall.

With the episode “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” American Crime Story delivers a promising premiere, one that announces an unashamed exploration of what it meant to be gay in the 1990s, even if it’s told partially through the lens of a sociopath who murdered at least five people during that period. We can only hope the rest of the series is as exciting as the first episode.

American Crime Story: Versace Is Pure Miami, Whether You Like It or Not