When a new TV series revolves around the central character of a series of best-selling, prize-winning novels, you’d best get the casting right. Luckily, the team taking Italian writer and journalist ’s series of novels about the adventures of Carlo Monterossi to the small screen had just the man.
“I remember the day I met Alessandro Robecchi,” says director Roan Johnson, who also worked on the screenplay, along with Robecchi and a third writer, Davide Lantiery. “I had only read his novels; we had no idea whether the project would even see the light of day. However, the moment I met him, I was sure of one, small thing: Monterossi was his alter ego (he had written him younger just to mix up the cards), and there was only one actor out there who could be his cousin, if not brother, with the same DNA of the Milan kid who grew up in the seventies with his warm, sarcastic gaze, sad but curious, stern but ironic: Fabrizio Bentivoglio.”
Fabrizio Bentivoglio as Carlo Monterossi. Credit: Federico Vagliati
Milan-born Bentivolgio is a writer and actor whose career has included work in American and Italy, and it’s easy to see what Johnson means about a resemblance to Robecchi – the short grey hair, the striking gaze.
Novelist Alessandro Robecchi. Credit: Rosdiana Ciaravolo / Getty Images
The six-episode series is set up as two three-episode sets, named – fittingly, given Robecchi is also a music critic – like the two sides of an album. His first book about Carlo Monterossi, 2014’s Questa non è una canzone d’amore, gives its name to the first half of the series, what the production notes describe as ‘Side A: This is not a love song’. A further three episodes make up 'Side B: Of rage and wind', a nod to the third Monterossi novel, Di rabbia e di vento.
Carlo Monterossi is a TV writer who hates the tabloid-style show that has brought him success and money. He’s determined to quit working on the show, despite the exhortations of his agent, Katia Sironi (Maria Paiato), but before he can make that decision stick, someone turns up on his doorstep and tries to kill him. The police have no idea why, and soon Monterossi is trying to figure it out for himself. Helping him are Oscar (Luca Nucera), a friend who dabbles as a private investigator; and Nadia (Martina Sammarco), a quick, smart, multi-lingual TV colleague way ahead of Monterossi’s nostalgia for the past.
Martina Sammarco as Nadia Federici. Credit: Palomar
“When we started reading Robecchi’s novels, both Davide Lantieri and I felt that our job would clearly be to bring out the cinematographic aspects of his books. Brilliant, sharp-witted dialogue, shifting between the highs of the TV world and the lows of the Roma Gypsy camps and public housing, an ironic and auto-ironic departure that reinvents the crime genre thanks, first and foremost, to its protagonist,” says Johnson.
“With Robecchi, we explored Monterossi’s most important theme: his internal conflict between trying to investigate and getting his hands dirty with modern life – with its virtues and flaws, and what other city in Italy could illustrate this better than Milan? – while continuing to nostalgically cling, almost defensively, to the values and struggles of the world of the past where Monterossi was shaped and stopped… until the modern world shows up on his doorstep to shoot him.
Things get complicated when Monterossi (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) tries to find out why someone tried to kill him. Credit: Palomar
“This is why we tried to maximise, by delving into Carlo’s unconscious through the dreams that invade his nights, then bringing to light Carlo’s biggest nostalgic regret: [Lucia] the love of his life (an ideal that seems to have been swept away in our era), and by making the divide between he and Nadia even wider. Nadia is a second-generation immigrant, so even more alien to the world Monterossi once knew.
“As we were choosing the locations for the series, we knew we needed to start with Monterossi’s home: it had to have a lot of personality and be a bit old fashioned, but a place where you could see the new Milan from the windows, as if Monterossi were locked up in a tower, with the modern world getting closer and closer with each passing day, with its cranes and glittering lights. For him, the enemy of modernity is frightening and disorienting (a book he can no longer understand), yet it also surprises and enriches him each time he comes face to face with it.
“We also kept this in mind during the casting, as the costumes were being chosen, as we were thinking about the photography, and especially as we were working with the actors. This mix of high and low, irony and crime, this contradictory, paradoxical world, was our guiding light that kept us from getting lost in the game of mirrors of contemporaneity. And clearly all of this had to be seen through the eyes of Monterossi: the best of the losers, struggling internally with the difficulty of being himself while searching for an – albeit slippery – sense of justice that will allow him to continue to look at himself in the mirror each morning.”
Season one and two of Monterossi are streaming now at SBS On Demand.
Stream free On Demand
Monterossi
