"The paper moon" - I rather liked this one, although I didn’t get the ending, and yet it would have been better if they hadn’t wasted time in low-cheap tricks like showing the girl’s naked butt. They spend a lot of time with her because she’s ‘the lover’, and it slows things down. They should do more with the recurrent characters. They are the strong points of the Montalbano movies. Montalbano should really interact more with Mimì, Fazio, but also the other policemen, why not.
The story:
since Fazio is out because someone died of overdose, it’s Montalbano that listens to Michela; she’s worried for her brother Angelo, a 42-y-o man she hasn’t seen or heard from in two days. Together they go to his house, she has the keys, but he’s nowhere. When he’s about to go away, she goes deep in Hitchcock’s mode, looking up and then running upstairs towards a place where he sometimes goes to read in peace, but she doesn’t have the key to that place and asks him to break the door down. He does (easily...) and they find him dead, naked, but since he’s a man we don’t see anything and only learn about it when they discuss it. Which is good, and would be good if they did the same with females as well, but nooooo.
She faints so he carries her, but the neighbour doesn’t let him in thinking he’s a bad guy who wants to do something to the girl - actually it’s rather understandable that he doesn’t let him in not knowing who he is or what happened, but maybe Montalbano didn’t have a choice, they probably locked the house already and she has the keys not him... anyway, I guess he enters anyway somehow because aren’t they in the neighbour’s house when Fazio arrives??
Fazio tries to calm him down so the guy thinks that Fazio is an accomplice :p
Montalbano lets her sleep there and goes with Fazio to see the body. He then lets her sleep in her brother’s house. Michela tells him of Angelo’s lover, Elena. With such a sex-related case it’s no wonder that Tommaseo is involved, the usual pervert.
When Montalbano goes to talk to her, Elena opens the door in her underwear... I mean, not only this is Sicily, but even if it was elsewhere, who opens the door in her underwear???
To make coffee and talk to him she wears a fancy dress... she has a much older husband, like 30 years older, Emilio. Later she will explain that Emilio once married a younger girl and had with her the same arrangement he has now with Elena: since he is impotent and she’s young, he accepts that she has sex-friends, but every encounter must be announced in advance to not be considered cheating. When he busted his first wife without the encounter ever being announced, he got furious. Eventually they divorced. Elena was young and a drug addict, lost and alone. She used drugs when she was only 16, she was sent to a community but she escaped. She got arrested but released after they ‘used her’ for as long as they liked. Some time after she met Emilio again, they had met already once before. He remembered her, and from that moment they were always together: he helped her, cured her, never left her.
She says she wanted to leave Angelo and that that night she was supposed to meet him but instead she drove around thinking.
At Angelo’s house, Montalbano answers the phone and listens to some strange phone calls from men who didn’t yet know that he was dead.
He gives Catarella the guy’s computer to look into what’s inside.
There’s a funny, lovely scene with Montalbano and Fazio: (M. tells him to do something) I’m going - Wait! (something more to do) I’m going - Wait! (something more to do) I’m going - what’s the hurry?!? (M. talks some more than shuts up, Fazio stays there silent) can I go now? - who’s keeping you? (Fazio moves to go) Wait!... I’ll go with you. lol. I like that scene.
M. finds a strange key and an old burglar tells him that it opens a super safe.
Narcotics chief Liguori comes to talk to them (he talks to Mimì because M. doesn’t want to). There’s been three deaths due to overdose, one of them was a senator.
Catarella is very persistent but it’s very difficult to find the three passwords to the computer. (this is because he simply tries out various passwords, he should have used a password-cracker)
Angelo was a doctor, Elena tells him he was thrown out of the Board of Medicine and Michela explains the reason: after getting a girl his patient pregnant while she was underage (which apparently is no problem to anyone in this Country) he had her have an abortion. Later Montalbano speaks to her, who now has a good normal life with a husband and son. She tells him that Angelo was happy when she told him she was pregnant, he wanted to marry her but suddenly he changed his mind so she gave him an ultimatum. He said they would get married in a year and that they should celebrate, together with Michela, but it was a trap. Michela and Angelo gave her something to drink that put her to sleep, and then they forced the abortion on her. She slept at a friend’s house but in the morning she had to be taken to a hospital because of an hemorrhage, and so the secret was out.
Michela keeps accusing Elena, saying she’s evil. Montalbano finds some letters that Elena wrote to Angelo when he sneaks out at night to look at Angelo’s car. That neighbour sees him (well, he sees someone he thinks is there to steal) and shoots at him :p He talks to Elena about the letters while walking on the beach after having lunch together (who knows why she has to walk in her panties, mysteries of Italian movies maybe...). She says that Angelo gave her many precious gifts and that he told her to write those letters to prove to his sister that she loved him.
They had always been extremely close but now that he had Elena he wanted to keep her at a distance maybe.
Michela insists that Elena did it, she even tells Montalbano about the letters and tells Tommaseo about Elena.
Apparently the dead guy had a pair of panties in his mouth before he was shot, and this is the excuse to let us watch the naked butt of Elena as she shows Montalbano how her panties could never choke anyone. :-/ Montalbano tells her to find a good lawyer because being without an alibi she might find herself in trouble. He tells her he thinks she does have one but she doesn’t want to say it, so now she says she was with a man but her husband didn’t know about it.
Montalbano disturbs poor Pasquano while he’s playing poker :-p
Catarella is able to find two passwords, losing sleep and working on it non-stop, when they suddenly hear him screaming and crying, because the computer finally erased itself, there was a timed cleaning program, so he can’t access the rest of the data.
Another senator dies of overdose.
Montalbano finds Angelo’s bank and since the director knows him and is a big fan (although Montalbano doesn’t remember him at all) he tells him that Angelo had 800.000€ on his account, and also that he first came introduced by the two senators that recently died.
At Angelo’s funeral there were flower wreaths from both senators’ families and also the Sinagra family, but the casket couldn’t be buried because Michela had requested a big one and was too big to fit in the assigned space.
Montalbano tells Michela that she betrayed herself when she told Tommaseo that he had Elena’s letters, he never told her that, and he says that she knows because she herself put those letters in the car for him to find them, before she also hide Angelo’s safe because it would be compromising for him and she wanted to keep his memory intact.
(This whole bit was a little... you know, forced, not really working, she might have said that to Tommaseo because she wanted to much to accuse Elena, maybe ‘believing’ that he had them but wanted to protect Elena, after all how could she be sure that he would find them since he had to sneak out and secretly search the car? )
Montalbano says that she put the safe in the casket, and inside there’s cocaine, cut with a substance that he used to make more of it, and which caused the death of all those people. He wanted more money to keep Elena with him, but Angelo should have loved only Michela, they had always been inseparable. Once Michela fell in love and Angelo killed the guy, and that time when he wanted to marry the young pregnant girl, she convinced him to not do it, and choose abortion instead. ‘They’ told her that Angelo was dead and she had to hide all the incriminating evidence, but she also added fake evidence in order to incriminate Elena that she hated so much. When Montalbano asks her who told her about Angelo’s death she stands up saying she wants some water to drink but instead she throws herself down the stairwell to her death.
Montalbano finds out that the gas station that should have been Elena’s alibi is actually closed on Mondays, the night in question, so she couldn’t have met the guy that night (for such a pretty girl she has weird tastes, Angelo and this guy now...). Montalbano talks to Elena at his house, the story of the ‘paper moon’ of the title: when he was little his father convinced him that the moon was made of paper and he believed it, and now he’s done the same, letting these two women convince him of things that weren’t true. When he breaks her alibi, she blurts out “but I told you I had no alibi! I found one as you told me!” which is more or less what happened :-p
Anyway, it appears that that night Elena did go to meet Angelo, after driving around for a while, and she broke up with him despite his pleas not to leave him, but she went away anyway.
Then.... Michela shot him.. ?!? For real or this is what Elena thinks it happened? What will it be of the guy, arrested because of other stuff, who was suspected of this murder as well according to the news? Who really killed Angelo? Did Michela kill herself because of the remorse of killing her brother or because she couldn’t live without him? Or maybe because she failed in protecting his image? Also failing to obey to what ‘they’ told her to do, so she might also be scared of them?
I’m not really sure about the ending of this episode...
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