Literary classic on Netflix: the meow of the pink leopard

The anticipation could hardly have been greater: « The Leopard » is back. One of the most graceful classics of Italian literature is newly filmed as a six -part mini series – a lot of showing time to experience how the novel « Il Gattopardo » by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is visually revived. The Visconti version of 1963 was a little ago. « If everything is supposed to stay the way it is, everything has to change, » it will sound hardcore fans of this Sicilian moral painting in the ears.

First, the Netflix series does what it should. Offers dreamy recordings of the Sicilian landscape and a noble palazzo, the terrace of which exudes a lot of farns. On this, Don Fabrizio is converted by Corbèra, the Leopardian and cultivated prince of Salina. Before the panorama of the Italian nation -state formation, he experienced the end of his class from 1860.

The prince and its low -sinking elite have to come to terms with loss of power and an emerging bourgeoisie. And with the youth: with Tancredi, Fabrizos poor favorite nephews, who joins freedom fighters and falls in love with Angelica, the beguiling and rich daughter of a vulgar mayor. Then there is Concetta, the prince’s brittle daughter, who is in love with Tancredi. This is played convincingly, especially by Kim Rossi Stuart (« Princess Fantaghirò ») as prince. Deva Cassel, daughter of Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, acts as an eye -catcher as Angelica.

The Italian-English series indulges in the glowing sunlight, lets the camera slide over pink flowers of the Bougainvillea hedges during the day, over shimmer-green silk at night. Thanks to lush equipment and good activity, this can be enjoyed visually. But behind the hedge there is no leopard, but melodramatic pleasure. Where the novel in dark melancholy keeps flashingly flashing flashes, the series goes the trivial way. It is hard to read that « the Leopard » is also a novel about dying and in vain human striving.

After all, well -staged shallowness is often due to the not inconsiderable interventions in the text. The series makers invent characters, dense with Tancredi’s threatening shooting action scenes and devote themselves to the younger-with an on-off love between concetta and Tancrredi. The motivation is understandable: the trap allusions that the novel makes want to be illustrated.

But due to the melodramatic additives, not only does the omnipresent transience of the novel, also his picturesque sensuality and laconic prudence are lost. « Young people feel the pain stronger than older ones: the emergency exit is closer to them, » it says. The irony, which also does not spare Tancredi, is too short: « You can only become as charming as it is if some generations of ancestors have played and cheered their assets. »

Luchino Visconti in 1963 showed that you can stay true to the novel and create a cinematic milestone. For his « Leopard » he gathered Hollywood star Burt Lancaster and the young stars Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon in front of the camera-and left a moving-aesthetic masterpiece that praised Umberto Eco as a prime example of the literary film.

One aspect of the series is at least an interesting experiment: Prince -Daughter Concetta almost becomes the main character of an educational novel here and counteracts Leopard’s same end. Perhaps the series is more feminist to end up with a female target group that is interested in costume films and literary films.

Or the series makers want to win parts of a non-small reader in the Young and New Adult Literature. The series does not give that melancholy for lurking transience like the novel. But it also does not offer its relaxed comfort. This pink-colored leopardchen adheres too much kitsch to the paws to bring the fine-ironic spirit of the classic into the living room.

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« The Leopard », six parts of 60 minutes on Netflix each with 60 minutes