Made by Frenchmen, but essential nonetheless

This past winter, during the only decent blizzard of the season, I hunkered down and watched all 8 hours of the documentary mini-series, "The Staircase". In the pantheon of cinema which explores whether or not the effeminate husband beat his wife to death over the head, The Staircase is a shocking entry. The husband in question is Michael Peterson, an inelegant best-selling writer of historico-battle novels set in Vietnam depicting army buddies confiding brotherliness as VC bullets whiz past. One night, Peterson's wife, a chirpy VP at Nortel, ends up dead at the bottom of the staircase in their North Carolina McMansion. Police arrest Peterson, who is also a muckraking columnist in the local rag, and the DA charges him with Murder One. The wily French filmmakers manage to insinuate their cameras into every aspect of the proceeding investigation and the trial. The result is a very intimate and hypnotic document of a trial - and the upper-crust of the New South - that gets weirder by the day. Is he guilty? Is the DA getting sweet revenge? Will his children turn on him? What about the corpse in faraway Germany? What about the fireplace poker?

Thus ends the first installment of my Friday cinema recommendation: The Staircase, by some Frenchmen.