A summer ago: here’s who killed Arianna

It is a journalistically very Italian habit to deal with a title when it is just starting and then abandon it during the work, when it reaches its best moment. In the case of A summer agothe amazing Sky Original series produced by Fabula Pictures that brought together an average of 900 thousand average spectators since it debuted on Sky and streaming on NOW, however, we couldn’t help ourselves, given that the development took us so much that not only did it make us do a thousand conjectures to guess who could have killed Arianna, but it also made us jump out of our seats when we found out how things really happened. Since we are dangerously in territory of spoilerswe recommend all viewers to A summer ago who have not yet seen the eighth and final episode of stop reading here because we don’t want to have you on our conscience – without considering that, now, it’s a spoiler even to tell how it ended Pretty Woman -. If, however, you saw how it ended A summer ago and you can’t wait to meet someone to comment on what you witnessed, you’re in the right place.

Warning: Spoilers

A summer agoas we know, is all about Arianna’s mysterious disappearanceplayed by the very talented Antonia Fotaras, and about his murder. His body was, in fact, found inside a car in the deep waters of a lake after almost thirty years, and it is logical to try to understand who it was who ended his life in the nineties, more precisely on the evening of the World Cup final from which the girl disappeared. Over the course of the episodes we suspected a bit of everyone: the middle-aged man with whom Arianna was having an affair; of the latter’s wife played by Eleonora Giovanardi; Of Adrian (Luca Maria Vannuccini) and, above all, Arianna’s abusive and irascible ex-boyfriend of that period, that is Philip Branca, played by Giovanni De Giorgi in the adult version and by Francesco Della Torre in the young version. Looking at much of the season finale, it seems that he himself is the culprit, not only for having stunned Elio (Linen Pillow) leading him into his shed for a harsh confrontation between the two, but also for having collected dozens of clippings regarding Arianna’s disappearance over the years.

After speaking with Elio, that since Arianna was found dead she began to travel through time precisely in the days close to his disappearance, under the illusion of being able to avoid his demise, the latter convinces himself that the culprit could not have been Fabio. It’s true, the boy lived in torment and in the memory of the girl all his life but not because he had killed her, but because he hoped sooner or later to catch the real culprit and make him pay. In the end, one step away from the definitive resolution of the case, Elio goes back one last time to 1990, precisely to the evening of his disappearance. Arianna has no intention of following the World Cup final and she distances herself from her, but Elio doesn’t want to leave her alone for a moment because he is convinced that suddenly someone will come out to hurt her. The two move away, she doesn’t want him to be so close to her so, at a certain point, Elio, played in the young version by a great Filippo Scotti, spill the beans: Arianna, you will die tonight, he tells her as if it were a sentence. At that point Arianna becomes agitated, he tries to reason with her but the girl loses her balance and hits her head against a stone, which kills her instantly. So let’s discover the craziest twist A summer ago: even if he didn’t want to, it was Elio himself who caused the girl’s death, finding himself faced with an impossible choice: spill the beans and accept the consequences of his actions or fake the disappearance and continue living his life?

It is at this point that A summer ago puts it on stage an indelible sequence: the meeting between the Elio of the past and the Elio of the present and an active discussion on what is best to do. Elio would never have wanted to kill Arianna but things, unfortunately for him – and especially for her – went like this. The only logical choice that Guanciale’s Elio traces is simulate disappearance making the girl’s body disappear into the depths of the lake, but not before taking away her mother’s wedding ring which, without time travel, would have stuck him in the future, leading him to serve the sentence for killing her. Through this stratagem, Elio gets by, builds a family together with his wife Isotta (Nicole Grimaudo) and daughter Alice (Ginevra Francesconi) and tries to forget what happened, even though the thought of having unwittingly ended his life a girl who dreamed of running away and he will never abandon him to live his life far from Rome.

It is in this ending so articulated and so well written – made even more convincing by the extraordinary interpretation of Scotti and Guanciale – That A summer ago is confirmed one of the most successful detective stories of Italian serials showing us that, often, daring is the only way to create a narrative line capable of destabilizing the viewer. Honor, in this, to the direction of Davide Marengo and Marta Gavinato the screenwriters Valerio Cilio, Federico Favot, Michele Alberico and Massimo Bacchini and, above all, to Skywhich is putting together original productions that are so strong and powerful that they deserve all the attention they deserve.