What happened to Baby Jane? Franca Leosini corrects her shot and hits the mark

When social networks were born and thousands of fans came out, transforming it into a meme and a holy card, as she would say, Franca leosini welcomed the news with jubilation and a bit of surprise: for years he had occupied the second evening of Rai3 with great professionalism, but unaware that his syntactic doodles were studied and collected by a very young audience unaccustomed not only to the subjunctive, but also to such a wise use of qualifying adjectives. The interviews floundered, Leosini explains in detail the meticulous work that leads her each time to research in depth before tackling a new episode of Cursed Stories, says that a vegetable seller from Naples has her photo hanging in the shop as if she, Leosini, possessed celestial powers: she says it with elegance and, apparently, trying to keep my distance from all this fuss, but the truth is that Leosini falls a little victim to us. We notice this in the latest editions of his cult program, meanwhile promoted in prime time: the Leosini brand – suit, marbled hair, thickly written, underlined notebooks of different colors – is the same as always, yet something has changed.

The finest linguistic expressions are packaged more carefully and more frequently. Some turns of phrase are so convoluted that it is as if Leosini had prepared at the table not only the questions to ask the killer, but also the easiest way to attract leosiners helping them turn it into a catch-like gif. The tone, in the presence of certain characters, takes on a new outline: in a veiled way, it is as if his evident intellectual superiority somehow weighed on the interviews he conducts, leading the interviewee to experience a conversation about which often does not grasp the sense. It is the case of Sabrina Misseri and Cosima Serrano, who in some moments struggle to follow Leosini’s speeches – in those two episodes, the presenter will shiver reading a page in Sarah Scazzi’s diary for having found herself faced with a conditional used instead of the subjunctive – only to return to a more robust rigor in the presence of interviewers in possession of the right tools to stand up to them, like the Castagna brothers. Cursed Stories it becomes, over time, more and more francaleosinicentico: more than the cursed story itself, the viewer tunes in to observe her, Franca Leosini, and try to understand what else she will invent.

We thought that the trend was now this, but it is precisely here that Leosini corrects the shot with a new program, Who Framed Baby Jane?, title of a famous film by Robert Aldrich that revived a long-running Hollywood feud like the one between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, which is in fact a spin-off of Cursed Stories. In the two episodes aired on Rai3 on 4 and 11 November, Leosini decides to tackle a delicate topic on which we have never dwelled enough: the reintegration of the offender after detention, the lucid and detached gaze of someone who no longer speaks from the common room of a prison, but with freedom in his hands. The setting is that of a television studio, something new for Leosini and the leosiners, the questions become more subtle and soft, and the attitude is more focused on listening than it was before. Of course, even here the doodles, between “the city that has the stigmata of the province” and “The color of the sea that burns all anxiety from nicotine”, there is no shortage, but the Leosini is that, it would not be her if she gave up her register. The impression is of being in front of a professional who understood that the exhibition had gone too far and who tried, while remaining herself, to find a new measure. The result is a cleaner program which we hope to see again soon.