This film was a surprise in several ways. The director and star, Pietro Germi, was a noted creator of satires on Italian society, but in this film he produces one of the better police procedural mysteries I've ever seen. A woman is found murdered in her Rome apartment only a week after a neighboring apartment was burgled. Commissario Ingravallo (Germi) thinks the two crimes may be related, and as the investigation proceeds the list of suspects in the woman's death gets longer and longer. The story gets more complicated, but the solution turns out to be simple yet unexpected.
The first thing that struck me about this film was how modern it felt; it has the same style and tone of any contemporary TV cop show in which detectives rely on teamwork and police procedures to get the job done. Not a lot of time is wasted on extraneous characters or events; the film focuses closely on the detectives and their work and that's what makes the film so engrossing. It also feels very contemporary in the way it balances humorous and serious moments. The two are blended perfectly, and the easiest comparison is to say that, all in all, it felt like an episode of the Italian TV series Detective Montalbano. That series is very good indeed so it's not slighting Un Maladetto Imbroglio to say that it resembles a TV show; in fact, it crossed my mind that Andrea Camilleri, the author of the Montalbano mystery novels, may have been inspired by this film.
Pietro Germi was a triple threat as a writer/director/actor and has a long list of credits, most notably Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned. The latter film, in particular, takes a scathing look at Italian society with its story of Sicilian machismo run amok. When the greats of Italian cinema are mentioned, Germi's name doesn't come up often, or at all, but maybe it should.
I'd heard of author Andrea Camilleri and his Commissario Montalbano mysteries, but until last week I didn't know they'd been filmed for Italian television. Twenty-two of them, no less. The library recently got the whole collection on DVD with English sub-titles and I've been working my way through them. They're excellent.
Putting aside their quality as mysteries for the moment, the thing about this series that really stands out is the craftsmanship with which they've been made. All ten episodes I've seen so far look great. The cinematography is absolutely first-rate. Two cinematographers have worked on the series and they both make great use of single-source, natural lighting for their interior shots. And an equal amount of care has been put into set design with the careful choice of colours to complement the cinematography. The locations? Let's just say you'll be booking a vacation to Sicily after seeing only a few episodes. The soundtrack also deserves praise both for its quirkiness and its unobtrusiveness. Some TV shows, notably Dr. Who, give the audience an unrelenting earbashing with bombastic scores. In sum, Montalbano looks and sounds fantastic.
As mysteries, this series relies more on characterization and pitch-perfect casting to carry the weight rather than clever, devious plotting. The stories are always interesting, often intriguing, but more for the characters they introduce than the plots. One episode, for example, "borrows" the plot from Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders. That plot is one of the most original in crime fiction, but by now it's been lifted by just about every crime writer going, and most viewers are quite familiar with it.
The actors, led by Luca Zingaretti as Montalbano, are uniformly excellent. I get the feeling that the producers have tried to use local non-professional talent, because some of the smaller roles are filled by people who have, shall we say, non-professional faces but a great deal of enthusiasm. This is all for the best because the glossy look of the shows is balanced out by cast members who look like they've been pulled off the streets and fields of Sicily. But Zingaretti is very much the star of the show. He looks and acts tough without coming across as vicious, and he's equally adept at looking foolish or awkward when the story calls for it. He's in virtually every second of every show, and it's a testament to his acting ability and appeal that he never wears out his welcome.
If you try and order the DVDs from Amazon keep in mind that for some reason they're listed as Detective Montalbano, not Inspector or Commissario. If your taste in TV cops runs to something grittier and French, check out my review of Braquo, a nasty but entertaining mini-series about some ruthless Paris cops. The trailer below is for the most recent episodes of Montalbano.
