P.produced and written by her husband, Ed Sincler. But even if Landscapers – A near-perfect crime – mini series in four parts on Sky Atlantic and streaming on NOW – was the product of another showrunner, nothing would detract from Olivia Colman applause for his portrait of Susan Edwards.
Nor a David Thewlis, the actor who plays Christopher.
Together they form a rather bizarre middle-aged English couple who lives in a hovel in France, she is penniless but very much in love. With a room crammed with cinematic memorabilia, especially Gary Cooper, and drama of the language barrier for his job interviews.
The answer to this misery is given by the real ones Susan and Christopher, who are instead a couple that have become famous for having killed, and then buried in the backyard, her parents, in 1998. For having made believe for 15 years that they were still alive. Of having drained all their accounts until, escaped to Lille following government requests to have a face to face with Susan’s father, a centennial retiree, were forced to return to England.
Where in the meantime the police, briefed on the facts by David’s stepmother – to whom the stepson had confessed to the crime and asked for money -, exhumed the bodies and awaits them at the Eurostar terminus.
“No comment”
The defense of Susan and Christopher, divided into separate cells, is that of a well-studied version, seasoned with the firmness of multiple “no comment”.
And that is, that the parents were not at all saint’s shins, who quarreled and quarreled; and that at one point the mother killed her husband, and in turn Susan the mother, after the unbearable offenses to be a little good, undeserving of love, of respect and of Christopher himself. Known via a marriage announcement and then married in 1983.
Bury them it was therefore a romantic agreement, according to the couple, not to have Susan crushed by justice and to win a little happiness. Only the first withdrawal of 40,000 pounds it happened the day after the double shooting, and that the total accounts speak of a lifestyle marked by expenses crazy: for original autographs of movie stars and other collectibles of the golden age of Hollywood (her passion); for postage stamps and other military devilry (his passion).
As well as the exceptional detail of a close correspondence with Gerard Depardieu. Not a namesake, just that of The last metro.
From left: Kate O’Flynn (Emma Lancing), Samuel Anderson (Paul Wilkie) and Olivia Colman (Susan).
Love is… getting away with it
Who shot, buried, stole in the end it matters little. What matters, in Landscapers – A near-perfect crime, is precisely the landscape, understood as the artificial paradise created by Susan and Christopher. Their understanding, their communicative alphabet, the candor with which they answer the investigators’ questions. And again the dissociation from reality, the fixations for cinema, the mute aid society they have created.
Are they simpleton, strategist clothes? I’m like Rosa and Olindo of the Erba massacre: elusive despite the psychiatric reports, smiling despite the trial, united despite the separate interviews. A drama that Will Sharpe, director of all the episodes, illustrates through a pastiche oneiric-procedural.
Of black and white shots, theatrical openings in which the characters illustrate the facts, fabulous atmospheres, Susan companion of Gary Cooper and descriptions projected on the big screen.
It is a language which obviously recalls many films and authors, but whose sum of findings does not stifle the story, on the contrary it gives the crime series a strange balance, otherwise reduced to interrogations interspersed with the usual flashbacks.
Olivia Colman.
Instead this trend suspended, metacinematographic, closes the case of the English couple in a bubble, making it a private affair, a show to which we have access from behind the scenes. But the direction of the representation is theirs, and a solution to the crime must be found by weighing the balance between what is offered to us between their fictionalized version, the police deductions (deliberately silly by contrast) and the naked chronicle.
The latter limited to the credits, with period images and the aseptic reading of the commentators. A lock that looks like a rude awakening: Susan and Christopher – now 63 years old – are serving a 25-year sentence. And second Ed Sincler: “They are still a couple in love and united, as much as one can be by being locked in two separate prisons“.
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