Your Moulin RougeDear mind was not playing tricks on you: it really was Undo Star and executive producer Nicole Kidman H.B.O. The cover of “Dream is a Little Dream of Me” is sung in the opening title sequence of the limited series.
The choice of song, of course, David E. The Kelly-Penn thriller is dark and, you know, given the title of the title, so wet in irony. But in the first part of Sunday’s premiere, Kidman’s moneyed Manhattanite Grace Fraser Was Director Susan Beer’s nightmare of living something of a fictional life in New York’s haunted vision also came as a nightmare.
The initial flash-forward sequence – in which a mysterious young boy makes a horrific discovery at his artist-mother’s Manhattan studio – serves as a fairly obscure thing that a bunch of bad stuff is going down. From there we jump back two days and push into the utopian existence of Grace, including a glorious emergence, a morning filled with her pediatric gynecologist-husband Jonathan (Hugh Grant) and just the right amount of finger wagging on her violin. Playing, private-school son Henry (Night managerNo Noah Jupe). And it all happens inside an obscene Upper East Side townhouse that has bigger stairs than most Manhattan apartments (mine included). It’s a great life if you can get it!
We follow Grace to work – she shrinks in a rather aggressive bedside manner – before shading into the main event of the day: an auction committee meeting with a local private-school mother. Among the tea-making women present were West Wing‘Janelle Moloney and The scary story of AmericaLily Rabe (aka Grace’s BFF), and all of them are surprised about a new member / party crusher named Elena (played by Italian actress Matilda de Angelis). “It simply came to our notice then ScholarshipMolly’s super white privileged Sally whispers Grace.
The women spend most of the crucial cuts in the shooting of the banquet at Elena. But not grace. It is making an envelope out of the energy that gives the fish out of the water. When Elena starts breastfeeding her infant daughter Teresa right in the middle of the meeting, everyone’s disapproving jaws fall down. Except For grace. “She was just feeding her baby,” he later pulls towards Rabbi Sylvia. (During the reunion we learn that Elena also has a four-year-old son named Miguel, who may or may not be the same boy he met in the previous flash-forward.)
Crazy and somewhat obscure coincidence, Grace and Elena are in the same gym, a fact we will learn the next day when the latter appears completely naked in front of the first in the locker room. Elena Coos, the eye line of Grace who didn’t sound a little happy and uncomfortable with her female parts, said, “Thank you for making me feel so welcome … I felt like an intruder. You made me feel at home.”
Grace manages to keep herself entertained during the bizarre encounter, but she later confesses to Jonathan’s liking, “I am for all women that they are comfortable with their bodies, but she was.” Fantastic”
Oh, you haven’t seen it yet ‘!
On the occasion of the aforementioned hot-tity, super-white private-school auction / fundraiser, Grace’s powder room is one more part with her new friend / st run tax, only this time Elena is in tears for being vague. “Sometimes I just feel sad,” she sighed with sympathetic grace. “And lost. Do you ever feel that way ”
Grace ignores this question and instead teases the abusive life collector in the form of a non-therapy fee treatment session. Elena gently looks up at the gesture, probably because she’s read the unfavorable Yelp reviews of the female Dr. Phil, before running to the nearest elevator. Relevant Grace follows her and offers her to use her town car, but Elena also passes on that offer (due to her stay in Harlem). Elena is moved by Grace’s concern for her. We know this because before he gets off the elevator he uncomfortably approaches Grace and leans forward to kiss her on the lips. Grace is shaken and shaken and possibly-slightly aroused.
It takes us to today’s timeline, with Elena’s son Miguel expressing concern about his mother’s whereabouts after failing to come home with his father (and Elena’s husband) last night. Only then are we watching him enter his studio and find his lifeless body.
“It was Elena – she was found dead,” Giddy-for-gossip Sylvia informed the real grief and stunned Grace by telephone. “His son, the weak thing, find him.”
Sylvia speculates that Elena’s husband is the main suspect in the murder, but she is Of grace Two NYPD detectives at the door are waiting when Grace will come home later in the day. Lead cop, played by Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime StoryNo Edgar Ramirez, move on Aggressively Grill Grace about his engagement to a woman he got about 48 hours ago. Grace answers all of her leading questions respectfully and calmly, but based on the sheer amount of peanut butter, it’s clear that she’s violently slaughtering an innocent slice of multi-grain bread that she’s messing with. He only says to talk to Jonathan when Grace apparently starts to lose her cool. First, she is in Cleveland at a medical conference, she briefed him. Second, he did not find the dead man, he insists.
Given Grace’s utterly justified discomfort, Ramirez’s detective asked, “Doctor, are we upsetting you?”
While trying to reach Jonathan by phone that night to fill her in on later events that day, Grace’s nerves were caught scattering to the point where she would once again receive her voice email. When he follows a call with text, he hears a phone vibrate, and is horrified to find Jonathan’s cell in his nightstand. Dude went to Cleveland for a conference and forgot his phone ?!
Even more worrying: there are no Jonathan Frasers staying at any of the local hotels (at least not with a charming British accent).
In the final moments of the episode, as Grace’s insolent mind gets out of control, we see a flash of Elena’s distorted body. But did the vision originate in Grace’s mind that it was a red herring related to the acquisition? And if it was the former, it was Grace Remember Horrible crime scene or Imagine That?
What did you think of episode 1? Undo? Grade Premier below and then expand in the comments!
