NETFLIX – ON DEMAND – SERIES
With its prestigious cast and idyllic settings – the small bourgeois island of Nantucket, in New England –, The perfect couple (a perfect couple) has all the makings of a late-summer hit. Especially since we find ourselves with a familiar figure on the small screen, Nicole Kidman, whose tall figure gives the series, adapted from a novel by the American Elin Hilderbrand, an extra touch of glamour.
For once, the Australian plays a role befitting her 57 years. Greer Winbury is a successful crime writer who is preparing to marry her youngest son – she has three – at the luxurious villa where she is spending the summer with her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber). It is during the sumptuous rehearsal dinner that we meet the guests, the bridesmaids and best men, as well as the bride and groom-to-be, Benji (Billy Howle) and Amelia (Eve Hewson, seen in the series). Bad sisters in 2022), a young woman of much more modest origins.
Although everyone pretends to be having fun, the evening is fraught with tension and we can guess that this union, which Greer Winbury disapproves of, does not begin with the best of auspices. The next morning, just hours before the wedding, a body recovered from the water puts an end to the festivities.
Deadly secrets
The Cluedo-style investigation that follows is obviously less interesting than what it will reveal about the unhealthy dynamics that roil the Winbury family and the deadly secrets its members hide. a perfect couple It doesn’t have the satirical power of its distant cousin HBO, The white lotus (2021 and 2022), the suspicion that weighs on each character reveals the same cruelty, the same violence of human relationships, that we like to believe systematically goes hand in hand with great wealth.
The series takes on this slant with some effectiveness, particularly in its portrayal of the couple Greer and Tag, a mix of mutual admiration and resentment, dulled by twenty-nine years of living together, but from which not a single seam must be left to go. To keep up, Tag wastes his days polishing the wood of his boats and smoking pot. Greer churns out copies day and night to keep her finances afloat, more fragile than one might think, and exercises total tyranny over her household, for fear of being exposed herself.
This hyper-control, which is also common in aging actresses, is best embodied by Kidman. The series revolves around her, as expected, and the actress finds here a form of vigor and energy that we have not seen in her for some time.
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