“Sorelle” (Acorn)

I got tired of the plot line in “Line of Duty”. It became less believable and more gory. The characters were annoying and unlikeable. I thought: why am I watching this when I could be reading a good book, or for that matter watching something that exercised my increasingly stagnant mind? It’s not even a brain exercise because, unlike, let’s say, a good Agatha Christie mystery there’s not much of a whodunit. Money laundering, sex addiction, drug lords, blah, blah, blah. Honestly, I’d rather be playing Clue (as long as I can be Miss Scarlett).

But still resisting major intellectual exercise I clicked the remote to another Acorn series, this time one from Italy: “Sorelle”. It’s supposed to be a mystery series, but it doesn’t get to that until about 2/3rds of the way into the first episode. The plot is almost secondary to its gorgeous setting: Matera, Italy, described by some as the “most spectacular city in Italy”. Nearly 9,000 years old, “the cave dwellings are piled atop one another like giant rocks spilled from the sky. The sandstone landscape stretches across a hill, one road and narrow alleys slicing here and there through the landscape.”

The actors are beautiful as well. the talent ranges from acceptable to good. It does have a soap operatic sound track that shifts into dramatic organ chords on occasion (which never fails to make me laugh, even though I shouldn’t.) It’s possible that the director was trying to figure out how to get more excitement, mystery since the very beautiful protagonist , as Dorothy Parker once described a Katherine Hepburn performance: “[runs] the whole gamut of the emotions from A to B.”

I try to not think about what Matera must be like now in the midst of the Plague and plan to return to finish Episode 1, escaping into Sorelle’s beautiful sandstone landscape, imagining a future time and my own fantasy of not needing subtitles for the next six episodes.