A terrible disappointment. “The monster”, Stefano Sollima’s TV series dedicated to the sad events in Florence, presented Venice 82, came with many expectations and hopes, the promise of a different cut on the events that held a city and a country with the breath suspended for years and years. Instead, the director this time the Roman filmmaker stumbles in an artificial construction, a stunted direction, a confused narrative without a real center.

“The monster” – the plot

“The monster” starts from the double murder of Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini, which took place on June 19, 1982, near Montespertoli Baccaiano, just outside Florence. They who are in the car, a figure who approaches, laughs at shots, then moves away. Investigators gropes in the dark, there is no evidence to identify the killer who has long sowed panic. Finally, the research establish a connection with a passionate crime of several years earlier, the one committed by Stefano Mele (Stefano Bullitta), a bricklayer of Sardinian origins, against his wife Barbara (Francesca Olia) and her lover, Antonio Lo Bianco (Claudio Vasile). For that crime apples had been condemned, but what matters is that the crime weapon is the same: a 22 caliber Beretta. From that moment, for the prosecutor (Liliana Bottone) and her team, a search for truth will begin where past and present Cozzano, until you reach the name of Francesco Vinci (Giacomo Fadda) and then even of his brother Salvatore (Valentino Mannias). But between secrets, lies, reticence, finding the culprit really appears a mirage.

It is certainly not necessary to deepen the facts of the monster of Florence here, they have kept the bench for decades, they are still one of the most controversial mysteries of our history, with a quantity of tracks, hypotheses and procedural facts probably unprecedented. Stefano Sollima, an expert in crime and serial constructions, who has helped to renew deeply in our country, chooses a reconstruction that puts a disturbing vision, mysterious, disturbing not only and not so much of the facts and the process at the center, but of the origin of that evil. The “Sardinian track” is the heart, with the description of the obscure cultural and backward family universe translated in Tuscany, a violent, hypocritical, obscurantist patriarchal culture. The script is full -bodied, articulated, chases a detailed analysis of the origin of crimes as a human fact, moral degeneration connected to the woman’s body, to be possessed, martyred, mutilate. Holy and sinner, lover and wife, slave and victim, it becomes everything and the opposite of everything in the hands of Sollima. There is only one problem: in practice the series does not work.

Many good intentions, but there are no depth and rhythm

“The monster” has a narrative structure that would like to circumvent the problem of excess linearity, but everything he gets is confusing the viewer, while trying to entertain him without giving certainties. We are tossed from the 80s to the 1960s, then the return journey is made, we alternate with the various characters, with this medieval marriage imposed, this small group of Sardinians who while the world goes on, still live as 100 years earlier. In the center she, Barbara, with a Francesca Olia who becomes a symbol of the will of revenge of the female world, crushed by a male body that is everything, without exclusions, rotten and violent. The private dimension sinks in the family melodrama, in the dynamics of a degraded world, the sub -rider, the province, which our cinema has treated over and over again. “The monster” in the end is not that it shows anything new or so unexpected, the same reconstruction of the crimes, mystifications, of the confusion generated by apples, are not surprising, they are a dead end in a miniseries that immediately has the breath, arranges, loses consistency of minute in the minute.

The direction of Stefano Sollima is insufficient, the rhythm is frayed, heavy. A surprise for a director who has always shown a unique ability to draw atmospheres and make empathat with the different characters. Here, however, there is almost no impressed, often we find ourselves forced to follow a path of predictability in which the dialogues themselves are a boulder, they bring nothing. The Crime essence disappears, remains the socio-cultural one, which cannot be enough to fill four episodes that run in the round, with a constant, unnatural overnuting, which often takes away likely to the whole. “The monster” does not hold the comparison with the 2009 series as a genre product not even far away, he knows of algorithmic from a mile away in spite of the narrative cut wanted by Sollima, with an armed prosecutor more than rhetoric than anything else, a coarse analysis of gender -based violence that distorts what should also be a journey in Italy at the time. A lost opportunity, for a product that also seems to be made hasty from a formal point of view.

“The monster” will be available on Netflix from 22 October

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