When the ninth and final episode effectually titled ‘Alone’ airs today, the snake in the grass will be found dead. Though not by being caught and killed, but like the ancient Egyptian symbol of the ouroboros, where the serpent eats its own tail. Viewers following the second season of the anthology series American Crime Story , The Assassination of Gianni Versace on the online streaming platform HotStar would have guessed this spoiler in the first episode.
In a nearly wordless eight-minute opening sequence in the first episode, the two main characters, fashion designer Gianni Versace (a resolute Edgar Ramirez), and his killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) are shown stirring out of their lairs at sunrise. Cunanan is sitting on a deserted stretch of the Miami beach in Florida on the morning of July 15, 1997. He looks visibly distraught and is carrying a gun, making his motives clear. Versace, whose bedroom overlooks the beach, is shown getting dressed for breakfast in his Mediterranean-style villa that is fitted with sumptuous sights.
Both characters are alone and remotely together in their loneliness. Ominous stringed instruments take flight in the entire sequence and forecast terrible news on a sunny morning such as this. Cunanan shoots a bullet in Versace’s face, killing him instantly, and the title of the series surfaces right after it, setting the mise-en-scene for a chi-chi crime drama that works in reverse chronology, and makes it immediately evident that the victim is gone in the first episode, and the criminal will go in the finale.
The overture music is recreated from Adagio in G Minor — a neo-baroque Italian composition with a foggy history of origin, and is perfectly suited to the show’s defining moments and also its best bits. It will be no surprise if the same composition is played in the concluding episode when Cunanan takes his own life on a houseboat on the beach.
But despite the obvious narrative in subsequent episodes which proceed as a marker to count several dead bodies that show up in gruesome acts of violence by the serial killer Cunanan (Darren Criss in a breakthrough performance), it is through the show’s tinted lens, filming lush colours and stunning locales, and its perfect ensemble cast, including Penelope Cruz (in an ice-cold version of Donatella Versace), Ricky Martin (as Versace’s puppy-faced lover), Judith Light, Mike Farell, Finn Wittrock, amongst several others, that the show’s creators, director Ryan Murphy, and writer Tom Rob Smith open a window into a world of high fashion, glamorous people and hedonistic lifestyles, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the strata the cast already inhabits in real life.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is about as insightful as a tour of a patisserie, delighting in screaming pinks tones and burnished yellows, reflecting the titular character’s ostentatious tastes in clothing and décor, but where is the man in the scenario? Crucial scenes are heavily glazed in rhetoric (or sinister silences) and Versace appears to be an onlooker watching Cunanan take centre stage.
The show’s villians are no doubt sexier and more worship-worthy than heroes, and Criss’s posterior is on ample display (one critic wrote a punny piece saying Criss’s “magnificent ass” deserves an Emmy trophy) but these parts (including fetishised models tied up in bondage-style dresses) don’t add up.
The series is adapted from Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History , and has been dismissed by the Versace family as moonshine, probably referring to Criss’s moony behind as he casually remarks in the seventh episode, “Oh if only everyone could see me now?” to which his gullible sugar-daddy partner Norman (Michael Nouri) asks, “Who?” Precisely.
The ninth and final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story streams from today on Hotstar
