The wild true story at the center of “Landscapers” came to its conclusion in 2014 when Susan and Christopher Edwards were convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for murder. The series opens, however, on the day of their capture. It begins in black and white. Then the picture, as someone off-camera repeatedly yells “action,” transitions from black and white to color, bringing viewers at once, into reality, yet somehow still in fiction. Susan (Olivia Colman), stuck in prison, is on the phone with a possible lawyer (Dipo Ola). She and Christopher (David Thewlis), in her words, have gotten themselves in “a bit of a pickle.” Director Will Sharpe’s experimental four-episode true-crime series “Landscapers” is a quirky love affair, one that isn’t necessarily translated through a coherent narrative, this series is actually quite incoherent, but through the two strong performances from the show’s two leads.
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Though “Landscapers” takes place mostly in the early 2010s, you wouldn’t know it by the costumes and production design. Susan and Christopher, living in Lille, France, dress as though they’re from another era, possibly the 1960s, and their simple, shabby apartment seems ripped from the French New Wave. As opposed to his fluent wife, Edward speaks broken French. His joblessness and their deepening debt, however, hasn’t abated Susan’s lavish spending on Hollywood ephemera. A major Gary Cooper fan, she buys a poster of her favorite film “High Noon” despite the couple being months behind on their rent. The pair also hold a longtime epistolary correspondence with actor Gerard Depardieu (his importance pays dividends in the end).
Why are they living in a country with no income and limited use of the language? When a desperate Christopher makes a call to his stepmother for financial help he reveals a secret: Fifteen years ago he buried his in-laws’ dead bodies in their garden. He doesn’t admit to murdering them. He tries to explain how no one would understand the innocuousness of their actions. And well, neither does she. His stepmother turns around and reports them to the local British authorities, forcing them back to their home country where they must defend themselves.
To reveal any more details beyond that would spoil the pleasure of watching each confounding wrinkle emerge. Sharpe makes great humor creating a meta film within a film by making copious references to other films, which some viewers might unkindly reduce to pure pastiche. But that pastiche is intended. The viewer sees the world, lies, and the partial truths of the crime through these untrustworthy narrators who collect overpriced film ephemera masquerading as collectibles. The director’s creative decision runs similar to his aesthetic playfulness on the Benedict Cumberbatch starring film “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.” Both projects center on broken, outcast characters not at home in reality, so they retreat into fantasy. The strategy bears greater fruits in “Louis Wain,” but still finds affecting valleys in “Landscapers.”
Those gullies are inhabited by Colman and Thewlis. A pairing so perfect you wonder why it took so long to see them on screen together. See, Christopher often describes his wife as “fragile.” The description strikes the foul-mouthed investigators as odd considering how chipper, some might even say, resilient she outwardly seems. Colman guards the distress lurking underneath Susan well. Often it’s her who guides the actions of her dimwitted husband. And it’s her quick wrath that keeps him on guard. But separated, she crumbles from loneliness. Alone he disintegrates from his shortsightedness. Their perspectives drastically shift from episode to episode. It’s the switching viewpoints, wherein we see each spouse from the other’s eyes, which encapsulates how they see one another as their respective savior.
While “Landscapers” suffers from one too many cinematic allusions, one too many efforts of fitting the true-crime landscape on this singular oddball case (each episode ends with real television news footage reporting on the trial), it’s the rare love shared by these two folks that really binds the whole narrative together. The finale: which jarringly switches from a Western, wherein Thewlis plays Gary Cooper to Colman’s Grace Kelly, and a “Judgment at Nuremberg” riff, should crush any emotion under the weight of its forms. But it’s Colman and Thewlis, two exceptional leads humanizing two eccentric, difficult to like characters, who make Sharpe’s “Landscapers,” a feast for the eyes and a garden for the heart. [B-]
“Landscapers” airs new episodes on HBO each Sunday.