«Hotel Portofino», the British miniseries that turns into a soap opera – time.news

2023-08-02 19:43:21

by Aldo Grasso

Rai1 revived the British miniseries, set on the Ligurian Riviera in 1926

By changing the order of the vectors, the product does not change. Rai1 revived the British miniseries “Hotel Portofino”, already aired last season on Sky. It’s summer, Portofino («I found my love in Portofino, because I still believe in dreams, the strange game of fate in Portofino took my heart…»), an English series, who knows maybe I was wrong, the plot is interesting .

The initial idea is not bad, because Portofino is something more than a beautiful place, it immediately turns symbolic: it represents the light after the darkness of the Great War, the sun after the great cold, the rebirth after the civil death.

Ligurian Riviera 1926, the charming owner of the Hotel Portofino, the English Bella Ainsworth (Natascha McElhone), enterprising daughter of a wealthy British industrialist, has to juggle her rich, cosmopolitan and demanding customers, without finding much help in aristocrat and ambiguous husband Cecil. These are the years in which fascism makes its way and Bella begins to understand the violent nature of the Party, whose local leader is the greedy Vincenzo Danioni.

Although Bella reads Emily Dickinson, writes to a distant love, plays Italian romances to her guests, perplexed witnesses an attempted marriage arranged between her son and the daughter of a former lover of her husband, soon the story turns into a soap opera . There wouldn’t be anything wrong if the series didn’t reveal ambitions it can’t keep (soaps are all that is predictable, words and actions). In an attempt to raise the bar, there is also an injection of thriller: the local police investigate the disappearance of the Ainsworth heirloom. Both guests and hotel employees are among the suspects. Old law of fiction: the truth of history is in the details.

The «Hotel Portofino» miniseries does not include Portofino, not for realistic needs (the miracle of fiction is that you can pretend to be in a place by completely recreating it in a studio) but for reasons of the heart: there are not those details that of «Portofino» a place of the soul, an atmosphere of life and people, a space to dream.

August 2, 2023 (change August 2, 2023 | 19:42)

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