In the Netflix docuseries “The Prince” nuances are everything

Netflix Italy is back on the ground docuseries – so rightly celebrated (unlike seriality, more ups and downs) – to tell in three forty-five minute episodes Princethat is to say Victor Emmanuel of Savoy. The story at the center of the story, which acts as a trigger and common thread, is linked to a news story in which Vittorio Emanuele had been involved in 1987. The royal descendant had bought a house on thehorse island, in Corsica, and here he spent the summers with his wife and young son. A group of wealthy Italian boys, on holiday in Sardinia, decide to take a trip to the island, to have a bit of revelry and borrow (without permission) a dinghy from the prince. This gives rise to an escalation of tensions which lead Emanuele Filiberto to take up a rifle and fire a few shots. The young Dirk Hamer was injured and died a few months later after falling into a coma. An immediate outcry from public opinion ensues for the prince, he is imprisoned, then released, tried again by the Parisian court of assizes and cleared of all charges. Years go by, years in which Dirk’s sister – Birgit Hamer – tries strenuously and by any lawful means to do justice to her brother, and the Savoys return to Italy after their long exile. Vittorio Emanuele gets involved in dubious relationships – first involved with the P2, then in not exactly desirable trafficking – and ends up back in jail again. Here, he lets himself go into a semi-confession about the events that took place years earlier in Cavallo, being intercepted and filmed. Forced to make a partial plea of ​​his guilt, he admits his implication in what happened on the island. This, briefly, is the story at the center of the docuseries which has the advantage of bringing to the attention a fact not so well known by today’s public opinion.

The opportunity is tempting both to tell a rather multifaceted character full of ambiguities, and to emphasize the relationship between the Savoys and Italy. In the background – but not that much – there is the narration (above all visual and made up of details) of an hyper-wealthy and bourgeois world, made up of houses that exude seventies chic, bejeweled women, dressed in linen and rigorously in palettes (half of which with high-sounding if not double surnames) and of a certain upper middle class that lives hidden but very present. The documentary expertise is commendable, the pace of the story is high and maintains internal tension, the narration is stratified without being weighed down. The docuseries is conceived and directed by Beatrice Borromeo Casiraghi and produced together with Francesco Melzi d’Eril (double surnames are a guarantee here too). As if to say: you can tell (well) only what you really know. And in The Prince, nuances are everything.

What is the aesthetic of Il Principe?

Particularly central from a narrative point of view is the precise rendering of a certain seventies / eighties aesthetic that combines luxury, power and subtlety. Important jewels strictly in gold, design objects, showy upholstery, cream and camel palettes everywhere, boats, scarves, sunglasses (of which Marina Doria is queen but also the other ladies defend themselves). Everything contributes to tell a certain environment, certain social rituals, a certain decidedly loose relationship with the small and large dramas of life. The authors’ ability is to tell with painstaking precision the contradictions, masks and hypocrisies of a certain context without judging it but showing it in its intrinsic ambiguity (and often even superficiality). The Swiss hut in Gstaad from which the interviews with the Savoys are made does the rest in terms of cliché.

What is the tone of The Prince in three bars?

“Everyone wants, as in bullfighting, the death of the bull. But the bull has horns.”

“It was difficult to do anything else. What do you want me to do.”

“Anyone want a champagnino?”