The Leopard Series Review: Masterpiece with Spectacular Visual Language and a More Rhythmic Narration?
The Leopard arrives on Netflix. It does so after being the protagonist of one of the most iconic novels of Italian literature, conceived and written by Giuseppe Tomasi of Lampedusa, and one of the most legendary films of cinema in our country, directed by Luchino Visconti and winner of numerous awards including Palma D’oro in Cannes in ’63, a David di Donatello and 3 silver ribbons. Almost 70 years after the publication of the book, Netflix has decided to adapt the history of Prince Fabrizio di Salina for the first time in serial form with an Italian-British production consisting of six episodes, directed by Tom Shankland and out on March 5, 2025. The actors who play the protagonists are Kim Rossi Stuart, Deva Cassel, Saul Nanni, and Benedetta Porcaroli. We say it out of the teeth, this series has disappointed us. And now we explain why. Bringing The Leopard to the small screen is an ambitious undertaking, especially considering the long shadow of the film adaptation of Luchino Visconti, winner of the Palme d’Or in 1963. Netflix takes up this challenge with a sumptuous and high-budget production (it is estimated to be over 40 million euros), transforming Giuseppe Tomasi’s masterpiece by Lampedusa into a six-episode series that wants to speak to a modern audience without betraying the greatness of the novel.
The direction is entrusted to Tom Shankland, with the contribution of Giuseppe Capotondi and Laura Luchetti, while the screenplay is signed by Richard Warlow and Benji Walters, former authors of The Serpent. The cast mixes established faces and new promises: Kim Rossi Stuart plays Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, while Deva Cassel (daughter of Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel) debuts in a leading role as Angelica. Saul Nanni is the charismatic Tancredi, and Benedetta Porcaroli takes on the role of Concetta, a character who in this version takes on greater thickness. The result is a lush historical fresco that blends the story of the aristocratic decline with a reflection on social changes and the dynamics of power between tradition and modernity. At the center of the work – both of the literary original and the television version – is the reluctant accession of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the Risorgimento Italian with a Garibaldi and Piedmontese guide, and then the ill tolerated dominance of Turin over the south and a new class (the bourgeois one) over an aristocracy that feels gradually deprived of power, lands, titles and even values. Against this background stands the story of two strong female figures, Concetta Falconeri and Angelica Sedara, respectively interpreted by Benedetta Porcaroli and Deva Cassel. But he is always dominated by Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina: The Leopard.
The Leopard Series Review: The Story Plot
The story of The Leopard is not only that of a man and his family. It is the history of the whole of Italy told in a moment of great change: the transition from a divided country to a single nation with the consequent difficulties of accepting such a radical transformation, especially by a Sicilian prince, still rooted in the old world that has always dominated firsthand. Against the background of Sicily grappling with the landing in Marsala and a policy in total change, there is the story of a prince, his children, and his nephew, the young and ambitious Tancredi, who aims to become a man of power in this new system. And he does it also through love for the young and beautiful Angelica, even more eager for his power. In the Netflix series, the character of Concetta, Fabrizio’s daughter and secretly in love with his cousin Tancredi, who, however, chooses to marry another woman, is very central.
Anyone who watches The Leopard on the screen must inevitably confront the titanic version of Visconti, with its sumptuous images, the impeccable historical reconstruction and interpretations that have marked the history of cinema. The comparison, of course, is unequal. If, on the other hand, the effort is made to circumvent the comparison with the masterpiece of ’63, this new version appears to be a work dignified, especially from the point of view of attention to detail staging, costumes in particular and of the interpretation of Kim Rossi Stuart whose charm is difficult to remain indifferent: his prince of Salina has everything the gravitas that the character needs, including a modernity in the gaze that ferries him today with credibility. Around the protagonist are the three young offspring around which the part rotates the main story. Saul Nanni gives face to Tancredi; he has nothing to envy to the aesthetics of his illustrious predecessor Alain Delon, if not a pinch of talent and one more adult and serious stage presence that perhaps will come with the experience.
To the little diva by birthright, Deva Cassel instead it has the role of beauty Angelica and certainly the actress adequately supports the role that was of Claudia Cardinal, even if writing transforms the vital and exuberant Sedara into one femme fatal endowed with awareness, ambition and disenchantment, stripping the role of almost adolescent poetry that the film consideration he brought with him. A different speech must be made for Concetta of Benedetta Porcaroli. The best of the cast of young people, Porcaroli yes finds it to be the main vector of history, the point of view (progressive and feminist) from which we are granted follow the story; and the rewriting of his character is the only one moment of modernity and closeness that is granted to the viewer modern, certainly now far from the point of view of the world of declining nobles who were told in the original novel e which in Visconti’s film took on an existential dimension, in addition to a much more evident and felt political sentiment. Francesco Colella is Francesco Di Leverage, as always extremely effective and credible in each of their interpretations, be they protagonists or by shoulders. In particular, the arrivalist Sedara di Colella is an unpleasant character at first sight who however does not avoid a crisis of the spectator, proving much closer and attributable to the feel contemporary that promotes commitment and ambition as tools for social climbing, certainly not a divine right given at birth (immovable position of the Prince of Salina).
The Leopard Series Review and Analysis
Netflix has decided to do a very specific operation with the series on The Leopard. He has modernized and romanticized as much as possible a story that was born as a historian wanting to bring this series closer to a younger audience and to very popular costume titles such as the Bridgerton saga to which Il Gattopardo winks in different scenes from those of dances to the most sentimental ones. Too bad, however, that this choice, however much on paper it may seem winning, in practice fails to obtain the desired result because Netflix’s Leopard is, on vision, a weak title, not very exciting and with characters with whom the public cannot empathize. The screenplay of the series does not help; on the contrary, perhaps it is its worst aspect. And despite having six episodes of one hour each available, this title fails to create a linear, engaging, clear story that gives due credit to the sumptuousness of the novel from which it is taken and the film by Visconti. For example, other series inspired by giants of literature, such as the one on One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, managed to do perfectly.
Netflix’s Leopard chooses to focus a lot on the character of Concetta, played by Benedetta Porcaroli, on her love sufferings, on her unrequited feeling for Tancredi (Saul Bassi) and on her confronting a woman different from her, the beautiful Angelica – of which Deva Cassel plays – who unlike her life has always lived it boldly and without looking at anyone. However interesting it is to focus on this very feminine and decidedly universal theme, all the historical sense of The Leopard is lost. None of the characters are properly studied, told in its deepest nuances of soul, not even what should be the protagonist of the story, the prince of Salina who is only given attention in the last two episodes of the series. There is no fluidity in the story, there is no good characterization of the characters, and there is no deepening on the more historical, social, and even geographical aspects of the story where you can barely see even Sicily, which was to be one of the great protagonists of the series. A real shame for a story that could give so much, could make you think a lot, even and above all on more political and social issues, but which chose to be yet another love story on Netflix.
With the face of Kim Rossi Stuart, The Leopard is the real center of the Netflix series, both for the amount of time that is reserved for him on the screen and because it is precisely around the Prince of Salina that rotates, for better or for worse, the whole world of the small Sicilian nobility told by Tomasi di Lampedusa. Don Fabrizio is a generous father, a magnanimous uncle, a nobleman of the past and even a superfine politician, a man of values but also an unwavering guardian of the established order – who in mid-nineteenth century Sicily it is “his” order, those in which he commands and all the others bow down. He is not a tyrant, let it be clear. If anything, he is an aristocrat who struggles to adapt to the change of time, an indispensable supporter of self-preservation who, to preserve his position, comes to take the most unthinkable choice: bow your head in front of Garibaldi and his, aware that the overthrow of the Bourbons will be inevitable and that he too will be killed if he is not on the right side of history when Italy is unified.
To prepare this unexpected approach is his nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, who The Leopard grew up like a son but who did not think twice before wearing the red shirt. Not surprisingly, the moral of the Prince of Salina is “if we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change”: if change cannot be stopped, then it must be governed and suppressed from within, without opposing it blatantly. What the protagonist cannot understand is that it is no longer he who controls the going of the world: big decisions are not made in Palermo, but in Turin; a new generation of young people is growing, with less conservative ideas and a different sense of honor; and above all a handful of careerists, enriched and social climbers tries to make shoes for the old aristocracy, thanks to the only thing that matters in the new Kingdom – money. The series, therefore, is the story of the gradual disappearance of the noble Gattopardo, whose yoke on the village of Donnafugata is slowly eroded by the passage of events, both slowly and inexorably. To show the decay of the Bourbon nobility, the series skillfully juggles on at least two floors, namely the political one and the strictly familiar one.
The weave is enjoyable, while the frequent overlaps between one world and another give dynamism and rhythm to the narration – thanks, of course, to a simply superlative starting material, which does not suffer too much from the adaptation on the small screen. As often happens in these cases, however, the reduction to a television series (indeed, a six-episode miniseries, for less than one hour each) is not painless. There are cuts, also because some characters (Angelica above all) are reserved more space than the original novel. And you can see: the perfection of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s work is not replicated in the narrative sector of the Netflix series, which struggles a little in the two central episodes and which tends to become too hasty towards the end. As often happens, the best episodes remain the first and the last two, while between the third and fourth there is a certain flattening that could discourage less passionate spectators. The ample space reserved for Concetta Corbera and Angelica Sedara depends on the fact that two prominent actresses were called to interpret them.
On the one hand, we have Benedetta Porcaroli, who confirms himself as one of the fastest growing faces of Italian cinema with a quality acting test. On the other hand, however, there is a Deva Cassel who – we say it with great regret – seems to have been dropped from above into the series to attract some more spectators. We understand the reasons behind his casting: his bewitching gaze is perfect for a seductive and fascinating character like Angelica. But, at the same time, his voice clashes a bit with the heavy accent of all the other characters, and his acting did not always seem adequate to the context of Sicily in the second half of the nineteenth century. What is certain is that we cannot speak of The Leopard as a “female” series because the original novel was not, and neither is its adaptation. Concetta and Angelica are certainly two strong and resolute women, but both constantly revolve around the imperious figure of The Leopard, who plays such an important role in history as to found (by opposition or similarity) the entire characterization of the large supporting cast. Support cast that – and this is a great advantage of serial writing – it is used only, when necessary, without heart attack the narration of superfluous details and above all without those slow presentations that distinguish many other TV series: the Salina Princes family enters the scene only when necessary, without making noise, and leaves the scene in an equally composed way.
At most, we can report some moments and some rather forced dialogues and slides from soap operas scattered here and there in the series (especially in the first half), which betray a slightly cheap management of the sentimental component of the plot – and above all of Angelica’s presentation to the public. The most purely historical part of the production, on the other hand, is its flagship: the air you breathe is actually that of Sicily from the nineteenth century, briefly interspersed in a parenthesis with a dismal Turin, whose distance from the bucolic Donnafugata is made in a very evident way (perhaps even a little coarse) with a play of colors that separates the warm and saturated southern settings from the dark and gray cities of the north. On the other hand, the technical sector does not drive the lights crazy, too artificial and “fake”, at least at the beginning: here too, as for the rest of the series, we must report a gradual recovery after the hairpin of episode 3, which leads to some pleasant aesthetic choices and, in some ways, sparkling, towards the end of the story. I applaud the music, costumes, and settings, all with attention to the smallest details and capable, on their own, of ennobling the historical re-enactment made by Netflix and his Italian-English team of producers, directors, writers, and actors.
The Leopard Series Review: The Last Words
The Leopard is a good TV series: it is not perfect due to some aesthetic, narrative, and management slide of the actors in the dialogues, but it is not even a bad production. The miniseries are looked at from start to finish, with a double-conclusive episode of a quality superior to the previous four. The starting material is excellent; therefore, it is not surprising that the narration is the strong point of the adaptation. The performances of Kim Rossi Stuart and Benedetta Porcaroli are also good. Less well Deva Cassel, although not for his faults: it looks a little’ a fish out of water, in 19th century Sicily. Be careful not to expect too much: this is not the remake of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film, neither in form nor in soul. Netflix’s Leopard is an ambitious production that reinterprets Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece with spectacular visual language and a more rhythmic narration, managing to restore the decadent atmosphere of the Sicilian nobility while modernizing some dynamics. Perhaps some purists will turn up their noses for narrative freedoms, but overall, it is an adaptation that intrigues and fascinates, a work that, while not equaling the lyrical power of Visconti, manages to carve out a place of honor among contemporary historical productions.
Cast: Kim Rossi Stuart, Deva Cassel, Saul Nanni, Benedetta Porcaroli, Paolo Calabresi, Francesco Colella, Astrid Meloni, Greta Esposito
Director: Tom Shankland, Giuseppe Capotondi, Laura Luchetti
Steaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars)
The Leopard Series Review: Masterpiece with Spectacular Visual Language and a More Rhythmic Narration? | Filmyhype
Director: Tom Shankland, Giuseppe Capotondi, Laura Luchetti
Date Created: 2025-03-05 13:03
3
Pros
- Spectacular photography and scenography
- Convincing interpretations of the main cast
- More rhythmic and modern narrative
- An excellent reinterpretation of female characters
Cons
- Less introspection than the novel and the film
- Some narrative freedoms that could make you discuss
