Were the Medici Italian?- Redux

Annamaria on Monday

I freely admit that it is cheeky of me to be taking a Bouchercon hiatus when I am not attending this year.  However, I have good reason to repeat this post.  It seems that the miniseries in question has been re-airing recently in the USA.  I know this because friends, acquaintances, and dentists that I have seen in the past couple of weeks have asked me--known to be a frequent denizen of Florence--how I like it.  I have referred  one and all to this post from nearly two years ago. In its publicity, the show is referred to as historical.  As you will see, I don't even credit it as historical fiction.  If anything, it is hysterical fiction.

So I ask you again: Were the Medici Italian?   

Well, not according to the Netflix miniseries Medici Masters of Florence.

This is an English production.  And whenever the English tell stories about Italians, they can’t help making the really important people in the story…well, English.  And, I am sorry to say, letting their prejudices leak into the other portrayals.

But before I get into all that.  Let me talk about why I have stuck with this series through all eight episodes.  First and foremost: the art direction.  The settings are superlative.  (I am only days away from arriving in Florence, but still, the backgrounds in this series make me deliriously homesick to be there again.)  The Brits are really great at this sort of thing in historical productions.  And here they have the cities of Florence, Venice, and Rome and the Tuscan countryside to work with.  Point a camera anywhere and shoot in those locations and you could convince yourself that you have extraordinary talent as a photographer.  The backgrounds of the shots are not always authentic, but they almost always seem that way.  The buildings and the tapestries and paintings on the walls are drop-dead gorgeous.  The computer-generated images of, say the dome of the Duomo of Firenze under construction, are pretty convincing.  I do wish, when they mocked up the façade of the Palazzo della Signoria, that they had not decided to make it look new.  I understand why they did it, but they managed to make it look fake.

Speaking of fake, let’s get down to brass tacks.  I am here to castigate the casting.    With only one exception, all of the important (read upperclass) people in the story speak English with BBC accents.  The Medici men, their wives, their powerful allies and adversaries, the Pope, the Doge of Venice all sound like Lawrence Olivier in Richard III.  All except for Giovanni, the founder of the power-clan of Florence.  The real Giovanni came from humbler beginnings, so, given English snob attitudes, he is not worthy to sound like a proper Englishman.  Dustin Hoffman plays this role, sounding—to snob ears—“appropriately underclass” with his New Yorkish American.  He also looks decidedly unpatrician compared to his elegant and in this production, devastatingly handsome offspring.  His wife is allowed to be haut-English, which I imagine accounts for the about-face in his bloodlines.

People who do things no English gentlemen would consider doing, like keeping a shop, laying bricks, or otherwise working for a living, they are all English, but have cockney or Midlands accents.  Moving down the social strata, we come to the serving men and concubines.  These males, IF they are evil, sneaky, and double-dealing,  they speak English with Italian accents.  The sexpots of the servant class also all speak English with Italian accents.  And they all have red hair; I leave it to you to figure out why that is.  To complete the dastardly stereotyping, people who sweep up and carry heavy stuff for a living they speak bad English with thick Italian accents.

 

The other super-obvious clue that these Medici were not Italian is that none of them seems to know how to pronounce their own names.  Medici is MED-di-chee.  NOT med-DEE-chee.  Albizzi is al-BEE-tzee.  NOT AL-bee-zee.  Pazzi is PAH-tzee, for god’s sake.  Not Patsy.

On top of which, they don’t know how to bless themselves.  This is a gesture every Italian Catholic learns by they time he or she is three years old.  In Medici Masters of Florence, not even the Pope does it right.

I will not go on except to mention that the first episode jumps back and forth in time, making it incomprehensible.  Knowing the actual history is of no help in following the story.  I eventually discovered the clue to help viewers make a modicum of sense of Episode One.  Watch Cosimo’s hair:  it’s longer when he is supposed to look young, and shorter when he is supposed to look older.   Oh and if you do decide to watch (the scenery really is worth it), try not to notice that though they are married to the richest men in Florence, the Medici women share only one lipstick, or maybe they all just favored the same shade.  It will take some effort, but also try not to let it register that acting in this context consists of showing off how gorgeous your eyes are.

Oh, I almost forgot.  The sex scenes.  They are not Italian either.  Having never had a love affair with an Englishman, I can’t reliably blame this on Englishness.  But the sex is boring.  No seduction, no foreplay, no fun.  When making love, they all seem to start in the middle.  And then end very quickly.

A rose by any other name

Michael - Thursday

On Monday Annamaria wrote a piece Were the Medici Italian?—partly tongue in cheek—about a British TV series on the Medici that ‘modified’ the history, used a variety of (English) accents in a peculiar way, and generally left Italian speakers unimpressed. I haven’t seen any episodes of the series—and don’t intend to now!—so I can’t really comment on it. But there is quite a deep issue that underlies the matter. Most of the writers on MIE face this every time they write. We are all writing primarily for English speaking readers, and we have English as our first language, yet our books are set in quite foreign cultures often with different first languages. (Zoe is the exception; I leave it to Caro to decide whether she would include herself in this or not.) The dilemma is how to do two things: firstly bring across a feeling for the culture, and secondly deal with the fact that all the characters will be speaking another language between themselves and often thinking in that language also.

There are some tricks one can use to remind the reader. As an example, sometimes when Kubu is speaking to a foreigner, we will tag the dialog with ‘he said in English.’ The point is to remind the reader that most of the time that is not the case. Here’s another nice one from Jeff’s books. Greeks don’t shake their heads to indicate no, they nod upwards. He uses this from time to time. Right away we're reminded that we are in a different culture and, by implication, that the characters are speaking a different language.

Of course one can (and does) describe the setting and discuss local issues and politics, but the danger is that it may ring false to the reader because English people in this setting wouldn’t behave in that particular way.

I think scriptwriters and film directors face similar problems. Occasionally they get it wonderfully right. People in Botswana almost all speak English—it is the official language of the country—but they speak it in a unique way, partly it's accent, but partly it's intonation that has been inherited from Setswana, and partly it reflects the pace of the society. When I first saw The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV series, I was stunned by how well this accent was reproduced by all the characters. The effect was immediate and pervasive. We all knew that the culture was as different as the setting. The fact that the characters would largely have been speaking Setswana to each other was no longer an issue; they would speak English on occasion and this was just how they would speak it.

Jill Scott as Mma Remotswe

Later Stanley and I had an opportunity to visit the set in Gaborone while filming was taking place. On set was a speech coach who would go over every line with the main actors. (None of them was from Botswana by the way. Jill Scott is an American; if I hadn't known in advance I'd have asked her where in Botswana she was from!)

DiCaprio and Hounsou in Blood Diamond

Since the series was made for British and US audiences, the question arises as to whether any accent would have been fine provided it was consistent. I don’t think so. The actors absorbed a bit of the culture along with the Batswana way of speaking. This seems to have been one of the problems with the Medicis. Different English accents were used for different types of characters and it didn’t work. Even worse would have been to have them all speaking English with Italian accents, as if Italian isn’t a real language but just a dialect of English. (Fortunately this went out with old B grade movies.)

Leornado DiCapprio isn’t one of my favorite actors, but anyone who saw The Revenant knows that he’ll do whatever it takes. In Blood Diamond, he worked hard at a Rhodesian accent. Most of the time it wasn’t too bad, but it didn't work for me. I would rather he'd just spoken ordinary English. But for people not from this part of the world, it may have achieved a better understanding of the character to be constantly reminded of the otherness.

I guess the moral is that one has to work hard to get this right, and that the rightness or otherwise may depend on the eventual reader/viewer. As I said, most of us in MIE face these issues with our writing every day. I’d be fascinated to hear your take.