Tortora 'avenged' by Bellocchio: the beautiful series on miscarriage of justice

The director at the Lido told how the affair did not hit him the moment it broke out, but how he was, instead, instigated to think about it by reading the correspondence between Tortora's then partner, journalist Francesca Scopelliti, and the defendant. How the miscarriage of justice, realised through the personal affair, moved his indignation and compassion.

In Venice, along with Bellocchio, were Fabrizio Gifuni (Enzo Tortora), Lino Musella, in the role of the turncoat Giovanni Pandico, Barbora Bobulova, who played Anna Tortora, the presenter's sister and creator of the format, and Romana Maggiora Vergano, in the role of Francesca Scopelliti.

'There are things you don't know,' Bellocchio explained, 'things that are obscure and on which, when writing, you have to take a risk. The scene of the young woman who proposes herself on the programme because she can cry on command, was born after seeing an audition Andy Warhol did for a girl, who for ten minutes remained motionless and then began to cry. So I wanted to tell the cynical dimension of Enzo Tortora who discards her because the time wasted 'warming up' the crying could damage his success. Only later, in his painful legal travails, do we understand why this scene is important. Even for the character of Pandico, we used many things that have been written, and yet, we put lines in his mouth that I don't think Pandico ever said and that we invented there and then'.

Filmed with the grain of the 1980s, as if it were a videotape and in a television style in consonance with the environment in which the protagonist is immersed, the first two episodes dissect the origin of the miscarriage of justice, the pretext by which the drug arrest could be made plausible. In fact, the first episode begins with the conductor snorting cocaine. Hence the hooking, nourished and corroborated by envy for success, which causes the media and noisy descent into hell. Bellocchio in Portobello is more attached to reality than he was in Esterno notte. Here, the director is all about uncovering, together with the spectator, the pieces of an enigma that has the depth of verisimilitude and becomes 'truth'. The prison scenes are very vivid, the iconography of the obedience of the organised underworld, the statements of the prosecutors disturbing. At one point, Bellocchio allows himself an imaginative freedom: a puffin in magistrate's robes that challenges the screen. But we are only at the beginning, four episodes left...