This three-hour long movie is very rich in plot. Although it's not a movie of perfect ten, it got all the elements you've ever want to have for a mafia movie. Rating: 7/10
2 Reviews
A very rich, complex movie.
Iamnetboy27 July 1999
The series gets richer as it goes on.
emuir-111 December 2013
Warning: Spoilers
I am assuming that anyone reading this review is already familiar with possibly the best TV drama series ever made, and knows that this is Season 9. There may be spoilers ahead for new viewers.
Arch villain Tano Carridi did not appear in Season 9, but the Season 10 finale has yet to come. Each season of La Piovra was a self contained film and can be viewed without needing to see the others. There was a continuing thread of fighting the mafia and one or two of the main characters carried over, although not always the same ones - especially women who seemed expendable, but the events of each season featured an entirely different story and was set in different locations. The action moved from Sicily to Milan, Zurich, New York, back to Sicily, Eastern Europe and North Africa following the different branches of the crime syndicates - everything from finance, money laundering, drugs, prostitution, child trafficking, political corruption and anything else they could squeeze easy money out of. It moved from the luxurious palatial homes, private jets and yachts of the super rich, the sometimes opulent and sometimes dreary utilitarian offices of the government officials and police, the dismal, cold, wet industrial city of Milan, the ancient ruins of Sicily, the charming snow covered villages of Switzerland, the ancient squalid cottages of the peasants, and at the end of the series, the erupting Mount Etna.
The quality of the film and the location settings got better and better over the years. Season 9 is a sumptuous grand opera and feast for the eyes, with an engrossing plot involving an American woman married to a Sicilian nobleman whose plans for economic development and job creation are thwarted by the financiers withholding their backing due to pressure from powerful landowners and politicians who want to keep the people poor and unemployed, as they will be better able to control them. He is than forced into an unholy alliance with an organized crime syndicate wishing to launder drug money and as a bonus gain power. As his wife sees her honest and straightforward husband gradually drawn in by the criminals her love for him begins to die and she falls in love with an idealistic young policeman sent to investigate the criminal activities. She is eventually maneuvered into helping the police investigation at great risk to herself and her son.
The film maintains a level of high melodrama, although continuity is rather slipshod at times. Unless it was edited and explanations ended on the cutting room floor, there are some inexplicable changes of costume at very inappropriate moments leaving one to wonder if the actors simply wore whatever they had come to work in that day. The leading lady survives some very rough treatment climbing the rocky walls of a well, and being dragged through a forest without so much as a run in her nylons. She then takes a wash in a stream, slipping out of her blouse and skirt and getting dressed in a dress with no explanation of where it came from, she wasn't even carrying a purse when she got to the stream.
Being a gangster film there is of course the obligatory christening scene in a beautiful old church heavily edited with cuts of a massacre of rivals being bombed, shot and machine gunned. As a bonus, a wedding feast held al fresco in the courtyard of an old vineyard estate is gunned down, including the bride and groom - I don't know why as I did not have English subtitles and had to watch the film in Italian, figuring out the action from the body language. In the tradition of the whole La Piovra series, no one lives happily ever after. Just as you think the lovers are reunited at the end of act 2, act 3 with its cruel twists has yet to come. Ah, but that is melodrama! The music by Enio Morricone sets the tone.
Arch villain Tano Carridi did not appear in Season 9, but the Season 10 finale has yet to come. Each season of La Piovra was a self contained film and can be viewed without needing to see the others. There was a continuing thread of fighting the mafia and one or two of the main characters carried over, although not always the same ones - especially women who seemed expendable, but the events of each season featured an entirely different story and was set in different locations. The action moved from Sicily to Milan, Zurich, New York, back to Sicily, Eastern Europe and North Africa following the different branches of the crime syndicates - everything from finance, money laundering, drugs, prostitution, child trafficking, political corruption and anything else they could squeeze easy money out of. It moved from the luxurious palatial homes, private jets and yachts of the super rich, the sometimes opulent and sometimes dreary utilitarian offices of the government officials and police, the dismal, cold, wet industrial city of Milan, the ancient ruins of Sicily, the charming snow covered villages of Switzerland, the ancient squalid cottages of the peasants, and at the end of the series, the erupting Mount Etna.
The quality of the film and the location settings got better and better over the years. Season 9 is a sumptuous grand opera and feast for the eyes, with an engrossing plot involving an American woman married to a Sicilian nobleman whose plans for economic development and job creation are thwarted by the financiers withholding their backing due to pressure from powerful landowners and politicians who want to keep the people poor and unemployed, as they will be better able to control them. He is than forced into an unholy alliance with an organized crime syndicate wishing to launder drug money and as a bonus gain power. As his wife sees her honest and straightforward husband gradually drawn in by the criminals her love for him begins to die and she falls in love with an idealistic young policeman sent to investigate the criminal activities. She is eventually maneuvered into helping the police investigation at great risk to herself and her son.
The film maintains a level of high melodrama, although continuity is rather slipshod at times. Unless it was edited and explanations ended on the cutting room floor, there are some inexplicable changes of costume at very inappropriate moments leaving one to wonder if the actors simply wore whatever they had come to work in that day. The leading lady survives some very rough treatment climbing the rocky walls of a well, and being dragged through a forest without so much as a run in her nylons. She then takes a wash in a stream, slipping out of her blouse and skirt and getting dressed in a dress with no explanation of where it came from, she wasn't even carrying a purse when she got to the stream.
Being a gangster film there is of course the obligatory christening scene in a beautiful old church heavily edited with cuts of a massacre of rivals being bombed, shot and machine gunned. As a bonus, a wedding feast held al fresco in the courtyard of an old vineyard estate is gunned down, including the bride and groom - I don't know why as I did not have English subtitles and had to watch the film in Italian, figuring out the action from the body language. In the tradition of the whole La Piovra series, no one lives happily ever after. Just as you think the lovers are reunited at the end of act 2, act 3 with its cruel twists has yet to come. Ah, but that is melodrama! The music by Enio Morricone sets the tone.
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