Detective Montalbano Episodes 23 & 24 (MHZ Networks, NR)

Location shooting (mostly in Ragusa) is a big part of the show’s appeal.

I’ve been traveling around the world, figuratively speaking, for years through movies, but more recently I’ve started doing the same thing with foreign television programs, which may provide an even better window into local cultures. Take the detective show, a popular format in many countries: among others, France has given us Jules Maigret; Sicily, Salvo Montalbano; and Sweden, Irene Huss. They’re all detectives, but each is a distinct personality with their own methods of operating in their own distinctive milieu. Watching one of these detectives in action is almost as good as paying a visit to the country in question but without leaving the comfort of your living room.

The cable channel and DVD distributor MHz is a great source for these and other European detective shows. I’m currently on a Detective Montalbano kick, and while I wasn’t aware of this show’s existence until a few weeks ago, I’m totally hooked now. Location shooting (mostly in Ragusa) is a big part of the show’s appeal, and as seen through the lens of this show, Sicily appears beautiful and fascinating, with complex layers of history and tradition beside which America appears a positive newborn, nation-wise.

Salvo Montalbano’s (Luca Zingaretti) official title is “Commissario,” making him the superintendent of a police precinct, but his title is usually translated as “inspector” or “detective” for the English-language market. Like most European detectives, he solves crimes mostly through brainpower, not force—there are brief explosions of gunfire in many of the episodes, but violence is not glorified or fetishized; its results are generally shown as horrifying and tragic.

Other regular characters on the show include Montalbano’s long-distance girlfriend Livia (Katharina Böhm), Montalbano’s younger colleague Giuseppe Fazio (Peppino Mazzotta), and desk-bound officer Agatino Catarella (Angelo Russo), who acts as a comic ethnic foil to Montalbano’s suave European demeanor. Catarella is an interesting character because he’s such a stereotype—excitable, dark-skinned, large-featured, with speech heavily inflected by the Sicilian dialect (misunderstandings between Catarella and Montalbano are a regular source of humor). He plays the village local while Montalbano is presented as a far more cosmopolitan figure (Luca Zingaretti was born in Rome and has a long list of stage and movie credits as well as his television work).

The Montalbano television series is based on a series of novels by Andrea Camilleri, a native of Sicily who worked for many years as a stage and television director and screenwriter before he began writing books. His greatest creation, Montalbano, is an individualist but has a traditional sense of right and wrong, understands the moral underside of his community (topics such as the organized crime and the drug trade are accepted as facts of life in this show), and is never too preoccupied to appreciate beautiful women, a good meal, or the view from the balcony of his seaside home. American viewers may be surprised at the frank way sexuality is portrayed in this show, but to me it makes more sense in terms of the way adults actually behave than the silly conventions required on American network television.

In “Angelica’s Smile” (Episode 23), Montalbano investigates a series of burglaries that turn out to be linked to the dark underbelly of life in Sicily, and Montalbano is faced with the sort of dilemma presented to Sherlock Holmes more than once—when something morally wrong has been going on for some time, but the corrective action crosses legal boundaries, what should a representative of the law do? There’s also a great scene involving a traditional puppet version of “Orlando Furioso,” and the very beautiful Margareth Madé guest-stars as the bank manager Angelica Cosulich. Cultural note: the fact of a Sicilian bank shutting down completely at the lunch hour is a key plot point.

In “Mirror Effect,” a mysterious series of bombings, and some local citizens who clearly know more than they are telling, requires Montalbano to exercise his powers of intuition and cerebration to figure out what is really going on. There’s a relatively high level of violence in this episode (including two attempted drive-bys as well as an American-style shootout), but far greater emphasis is given to exercise of what Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot called “the little grey cells.” Barbara Bobulova has a hilarious turn as Liliana Lombardi, who’s revealed early on to be a tramp and someone playing a role none too well, and this episode also provides a key bit of advice about keeping your secrets secret: do your own housework because hired cleaners will spill the beans every time.

The Detective Montalbano series has been broadcast on RAI since 1999 and more recently has become available (with English subtitles) in the U.S. on the MHz cable network and on DVDs distributed through MHz. Each episode is almost two hours long, with a self-contained story, so each is more like a feature-length movie than an episode of a television program. Both episodes in this DVD set include a brief featurette, the episode, but no other extras. | Sarah Boslaugh