Dostoevsky: the review of the first series by the D’Innocenzo brothers

THE D’Innocenzo brothers they don’t go along with half measures: you either love them or hate them. And the same goes for their works and for their first TV series, which is called Dostoevsky although with the writer of Crime and punishment it has nothing to do with it. Dostoevsky, Sky Original series produced by Sky Studios with Paco Cinematografica and finally arriving on Sky and streaming on NOW – all the episodes will be available from 27 November – it is in fact a story that delves into the lights and shadows of a man but also a bit of all of us. The protagonist is an investigator named Enzo Vitelloplayed by a great Filippo Timiwho sets out on the trail of a serial killer that he and his colleagues call Dostoevsky, who has the habit of leaving a letter near the lifeless bodies of his victims in which he describes the last moments of the unfortunates’ lives. Seduced and numbed by a darkness that has always resonated within himVitello decides to have, secretly from his colleagues, an epistolary relationship with the murderer because that type of morbidity belongs to him a little, even if we will only discover it in the fourth episode, with a so-called plot twist which will lead us to reevaluate everything we had seen up to that moment.

Beyond the plot itself, which focuses on many fetishes of D’Innocenzo’s cinema – the dilapidated buildings, the uncultivated and barren countryside and the petty and miserable humanity -, to make a difference in Dostoevsky it’s the details, given that the directors work hard to ensure that the viewer feels a certain discomfort when contemplating certain images and touching certain sensations. The extreme close-up of Filippo Timi sticking two fingers down his throat to vomitbut also the colonoscopy probe that enters the orifice, the disturbing clowns, the climbing ivies, the voodoo dolls, the mangled hand dripping blood onto a white sheet: the D’Innocenzos spare us nothing even if, more than for self-satisfaction, they probably do it to make us face a broken humanity who desperately seeks a redemption that he already knows in his heart will never come. In this dark tale in which the only notes of color are ensured by the yellow sleeveless coat by AmbraVitello’s daughter (he plays her Carlotta Gambavery good too) and by a sunset that stands out on a wheat field bent by the wind, Dostoevsky it is here to remind us that salvation is relative, and depends not only on us but also on the choices of others.

The result is a corrosive, annoying and disturbing human mosaic in which we can do nothing but raise our eyes to the sky and thank our lucky stars for not allowing us to have to deal with such cruel and disturbing miseries. The beautiful thing about Dostoevsky it is, however, also a clever mix of elements – from a very Lynchian dialogue that Vitello entertains late at night in a diner with a young bartender (Giulio Pranno) to a soundtrack that winks at pop, with a song by Francesca Michielin and another by Gigi D’Agostino, passing through the details of shoelaces to a letter written under dictation as happened in that forgotten masterpiece by Amadeus by Miloš Forman – in which the D’Innocenzos never seem to get lost, guided by an invisible Ariadne’s thread that binds them not only to the actors – also worth mentioning is the monumental performance of Gabriel Montesian actor that our cinema has always underestimated – but also to the public. We could perhaps reproach a Dostoevsky just having opted for a baroque script which in some cases fades into literariness, but only when we reach the last episode do we understand that the passage from death to life and from the shadow to the light of Enzo, with his bottles of pills and his hands always in the pocket of his jeans, deserved a construction dramaturgical that had its roots (also) in language.