In Big Little Lies, In a bewildering pre-Covid era onscreen, where crowds can be seen thronging New York’s 5th Avenue or in front of schools, Nicole Kidman plays a psychotherapist, mother of a preteen, and she forms a perfect couple with a pediatric oncologist.
Their friends evolve in a bourgeois environment. Women get together after school or to organize charity sales. A woman however clashes: she is young, lovely, does not hesitate in the middle of a meeting to give the breast to her baby, and lives in Harlem. We will find her dead at the end of the first episode.
The Undoing, it’s a thriller that looks a lot like the series Big Little Lies, recently broadcast on TF1, with the same Nicole Kidman. Same initial murder, same female friends who live in wealthy circles, same united couple and same hidden secrets that are revealed over the course of the episodes. It must be said that the two series have the same screenwriter David Edward Kelley. Except this time, we go from the blue of Californian skies to the colors of autumn in New York.
Nicole Kidman, already disturbing in Big Little Lies, is omnipresent in The Undoing : She looks sublime in a big elegant green dress as she walks through Central Park. Alternately troubled, loving, mother, daughter. She forms a couple with Hugh Grant that we enjoy seeing. The actor of Love at first sight in Notting Hill even offers sensual escapades never before seen on his part.
The series is spellbinding, but unfortunately it does not keep all of its promises. The strings are bigger and bigger, the suspense at the end of each episode, overplayed. It skates. And we no longer know at the end if we are in a judicial series or a series on prison. There remains a very good achievement and high-end actors. As for the title, The Undoing, in French, to undo, it takes on its meaning only over the course of the episodes …
A series produced for the American channel HBO, available in six episodes on the OCS platform.
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