Montalbano and the slip of the sheets

Thanks to resolution of technological and delivery issues, I'm again watching the Italian television series based on Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano novels.

The Snack Thief, from the book of the same name, offers something missing from the TV versions of The Shape of Water and The Terra-Cotta Dog: Montalbano dining at the Trattoria San Calogero. I'd wondered if the director had dispensed with such scenes as part of the trimming necessary when adapting a book. But a short scene at the San Calogero about a quarter of the way through this episode has all the easy intimacy and food-loving joy of the books.

One minus: Television is less able than books to supply information for a gastronomic illiterate like me, and I can't always tell what Luca Zingaretti, as Montalbano, is eating on screen. One plus: Perhaps better than books, television can convey the pleasure that Montalbano takes in his food even when eating alone.

=============

I complained in November about Katharina Böhm's performances as Livia, and comments on my post suggested interesting reasons for the complaint. Böhm gives a better account of herself in The Snack Thief, possibly because the story makes greater demands on her.

And a simple slip of the sheets in one of her scenes highlights a difference between Italy and America. Livia and Montalbano are talking in bed, and they are fully awake as they do so. That means they're sitting up rather than lying down, and that means none of that nonsense one gets on American television with the woman pulling the sheets up to cover herself.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Montalbano on TV and in books

I've managed to avert technical glitches long enough to watch two episodes on DVD of the Italian Commissario Montalbano television series, starring Luca Zingaretti as Andrea Camilleri's choleric, intuitive, food-loving, commitment-avoiding detective.

Zingaretti was several years short of forty when the television series first aired on Italy's RAI network in 1999; Camilleri's Montalbano is around fifty in the first book and ages from there. Zingaretti is bald and clean-shaven; Camilleri's Montalbano is neither. Zingaretti looks less like a young Montalbano than like an older Jason Stethem. (Or maybe all bald men look the same.)

In any case, despite the startling physical departure from Camilleri's original, Zingaretti does a brilliant job, coming up with actions that match beautifully what Camilleri conveys through interior monologue and free indirect speech. One favorite example from the episode based on The Shape of Water has Montalbano silently pumping his fist and exulting when he receives a late-night phone call from a political fixer, a call for which he had laid the groundwork carefully by planting a leak to the media. Television can't convey thought and indirect speech except through the clumsy medium of a voiceover; Zingaretti and director Alberto Sironi find the perfect objective correlative for the delight Camilleri has the character take in his own schemes.

***

Katharina Böhm is less satisfactory as Montalbano's lover, Livia, but that must be a hell of a difficult role. In the novels, Livia is less a physical presence than a voice on the phone and a constant prod to Montalbano's conscience. I don't know how a screenwriter and a performer could capture this successfully.

Isabell Sollman as Ingrid, on the other hand, is as richly physical and humorous a presence on the screen as the character is in the books. I especially liked her accent, just strong enough to remind viewers she's no native without lapsing into over-the-top Swedishisms. The high, wide sweep of her cheekbones helps, too.

Which movie or TV characters do what Zingaretti's Montalbano did: surprise you by not looking or acting the way you expected based on the book while remaining faithful to the book's spirit? Which have matched exactly what you pictured from books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009