In 2049, in a small town in the Aosta Valley, lives a woman who had once been a successful actress, had won prestigious awards, frequented the protagonists of Italian cinema and experienced that particular form of public attention that transforms a person into a character, only to suddenly find herself out of the spotlight, forgotten by a world that until a few years earlier seemed unable to do without her. That woman is called Emanuela Fanelli, she is sixty-three years old and no longer wants to have anything to do with cameras, journalists and celebrities, also because something happened in her life that has definitively compromised a career apparently destined to continue.
Of course, none of this happened, at least not in reality. It is the starting point of Sinthe series created, written and starring the real Emanuela Fanelli, arrived on October 2nd on HBO Max after its out-of-competition presentation at the Venice Film Festival, which in just a few weeks has turned into one of the most discussed Italian titles of the season.
A result that also has a concrete dimension: on October 16, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that Peccato had become the most watched series of the moment on the platform, while on social media enthusiastic comments, comparisons with Boris and declarations of love towards a protagonist capable of doing something that is not so frequent in the Italian television panorama multiplied, that is, transforming one’s public image into a comic target without worrying too much about coming out unscathed.
But reducing Sin to a particularly successful comedy would mean neglecting its most interesting element, because behind the story of an imaginary actress who bears the name and face of a real actress lies a reflection on fame, on the contemporary obsession with recognition and above all on the possibility, perhaps even more frightening than failure, that one day the world will simply stop caring about us.
Emanuela Fanelli and the courage to imagine her own disappearance
The intuition behind Peccato is as simple as it is unusual: instead of building a celebratory story around the career of an interpreter who is experiencing a particularly fortunate phase, Fanelli decided to imagine her descending parable, using the successes she actually achieved as a starting point.
The two David di Donatello won for Drought and There’s Still Tomorrow belong to his authentic biography, while everything that is told subsequently is the result of a progressive manipulation of reality, in which recognitions, professional relationships and television appearances become the elements of an alternative career that precipitates towards increasingly absurd consequences.
In this universe, journalist Malcolm Pagani tries to reconstruct the reasons for the mysterious disappearance of the actress, collecting testimonies, archive materials and memories of those who knew her, through an investigation that takes the form of a documentary dedicated to a celebrity who has fallen into disgrace.
The result is a mockumentary, or a false documentary, which uses the language of television investigation to construct a completely invented reality, while maintaining enough recognizable elements to make credible even what, upon closer inspection, appears evidently impossible.
The peculiarity is that Fanelli doesn’t try to imagine himself better than he is, but enormously worseexacerbating insecurities, vanity, ambitions and contradictions to the point of transforming them into the distinctive traits of a woman who has built a large part of her identity around the need to be admired.
An impossible cast to make fun of Italian cinema
What makes this game even more effective is the presence of a surprising number of characters from Italian cinema, television and information, all willing to play imaginary versions of themselves, often very far from their respective public images.
There are Alessandro Borghi, Sabrina Ferilli, Valerio Mastandrea, Geppi Cucciari, Ferzan Özpetek, Paolo Virzì, Francesca Archibugi, Fabio Fazio, Gigi Marzullo and many others, including Paola Cortellesi, who in the alternative universe of the series even became President of the Republic.
The short circuit is continuous, also because Peccato puts figures who normally belong to different worlds on the same level, bringing together celebrated directors, actors, journalists, presenters and popular television personalities, up to the surreal presence of Gabibbo, in a game of references that seems to want to demolish any hierarchy between high and low culture.
It is not just a question of cameos constructed to surprise the spectator, but of a system of complicity through which Italian entertainment accepts to represent itself as an environment populated by individuals who are often incapable of escaping their own image, committed to defending the prestige achieved, remembering past successes and maintaining a place within a mechanism that continues to change.
Satire works precisely because it does not need to invent a world completely foreign to ours: it is enough to slightly deform what we already know, accentuating the rituals, the obsessions and above all that belief, particularly widespread in the entertainment world, that everything that happens inside it must necessarily be important even for those who remain outside it.
Because everyone compares her to Boris
The comparison with Boris emerged almost inevitably, especially because Peccato also uses irony to tell from the inside a professional system that rarely agrees to really question itself.
But if Boris had found in television production the ideal territory to show the dynamics of compromise, the frustrated ambitions and the daily absurdities of those who work behind a camera, Peccato shifts his gaze to the construction of celebrity, transforming Italian cinema and its protagonists into a sort of self-referential ecosystem.
The difference is substantial, because here we are not only interested in showing how an environment works, but questioning the relationship that individuals develop with their own success, the distance between talent and public recognition and the ease with which a professional identity can end up coinciding entirely with the judgment of others.
Even the writing, signed by Fanelli together with Giulio Somazzi and Valerio Vestoso, who directs the series, contributes to building a universe in which realism is continually interrupted by surreal inventions, without the story feeling the need to explain every absurdity or bring it back within a reassuring logic.
A creative freedom that represents the most recognizable quality of the operation, while exposing it to the risk of accumulation, because a comedy based on the succession of gimmicks, characters and narrative deviations can sometimes sacrifice the progression of the story in search of the next joke.
Yet, precisely this willingness to take risks, even at the cost of not always maintaining the same balance, distinguishes Peccato from a part of contemporary Italian seriality, often built around recognizable formulas and characters designed to be immediately understandable.
The fear of being forgotten is much more universal than it seems
Beneath the comic surface, Peccato addresses an issue that largely goes beyond the boundaries of cinema, because the idea of building one’s identity through what others see, recognize and approve is now a growing part of contemporary life.
In an era in which visibility has become a form of capital, reputation is measured through numbers, reactions and constant presence, while success tends to be considered not so much a goal as a condition to be nurtured on a daily basis, the possibility of being forgotten takes on a meaning that goes far beyond the simple conclusion of a career.
The Emanuela Fanelli of 2049 is a woman who has experienced success and has not been able to separate herself from it, continuing to measure her own value through something that no longer exists, as if the loss of public recognition had also erased everything that had come before.
It is here that the series finds a less obvious and potentially more painful dimension, because the protagonist is not just a self-centered celebrity to be made fun of, but a person who has ended up believing the narrative built around herself, without being able to imagine a different life when that narrative stopped working.
Fanelli explained that he wanted to talk about a failure that was not necessarily the prelude to a rebirth, distancing himself from the contemporary rhetoric according to which every crisis must be transformed into an opportunity for growth and every defeat must find compensation.
It is a less consolatory choice than it seems, especially in a society accustomed to demanding stories of redemption, in which even pain and failure are often told only when they can be transformed into an edifying lesson.
Sin, however, gives failure the chance to remain failurewithout pretending that every life must necessarily become a success story told in retrospect.
The real success of Peccato is the freedom not to please everyone
Finally, there is an element that makes the moment chosen by Emanuela Fanelli to create this series particularly interesting, and it is the fact that her career, in reality, could not be further from the parable imagined on the screen.
After a long apprenticeship, cinematographic recognition and a popularity that has grown thanks to the ability to move from surreal comedy to more dramatic interpretations, the actress today finds herself in the position of being able to capitalize on the consensus gained, choosing reassuring roles and projects capable of further consolidating her image.
Instead, she decided to do the opposite, inventing an unpleasant, presumptuous and unsuccessful version of herself, entrusting friends and colleagues with the task of participating in the symbolic destruction of her reputation.
Of course, self-deprecation can also become an extremely sophisticated form of self-representation, and a series built entirely around one’s own person doesn’t stop talking about ego just because that ego is ridiculed. It is a contradiction that Peccato does not eliminate and which, on the contrary, contributes to making it interesting, because the protagonist seems perfectly aware of the paradox of describing her own irrelevance through a project that inevitably ends up bringing her back to the center of attention.
Perhaps this is precisely one of the reasons why the series attracted such immediate enthusiasm, at a time when many television products seem to be concerned above all with not disturbing their audience, avoiding any deviation that could compromise the recognisability of a character or the marketability of a story.
Sin does not give up its own quirks, does not continually seek consensus and does not consider it essential to make its protagonist likable, allowing itself a freedom that can be even more important than the success of individual jokes.
And in the end, a particularly successful paradox remains: to tell the story of a woman that no one remembers anymore, Emanuela Fanelli created one of the most talked about Italian series.
His fictional version, hidden in the mountains of the Aosta Valley, will probably never know. The real one, however, has found a way to transform the fear of oblivion into a new success.
