Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It takes courage to reimagine a literary masterpiece for the screen, especially when a near-flawless adaptation already exists. Six decades on from Luchino Visconti’s epic interpretation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s historical saga, The Leopard returns in the form of a six-part Netflix series. Yet where the film was a superlative piece of auteur cinema that captured the fading grandeur of 19th-century Sicilian aristocracy, the show is a superficial and ultimately superfluous update. Lavishly realised and ambitiously expansive, it too often mistakes abundance for substance and period details for an evocative sense of time and place.At once a chronicle of the advent of a unified Italy and an ode to the old world, Di Lampedusa’s story revolves around a noble family during the turbulent Risorgimento period of 1860s, when revolutionary soldiers and modern ideas landed on the shores of Sicily. Broadly faithful to this overarching narrative, Netflix’s Leopard follows the Corberas as they wait for the arrival of the new democratic order in resplendent palazzos and sprawling grounds. While the patriarch Don Fabrizio (Kim Rossi Stuart) laments the looming seismic shifts, his restless nephew Tancredi (Saul Nanni) embraces the idea of progress and joins Garibaldi’s Redshirts. “If we want everything to stay as it is, then everything must change,” he tells his uncle.This famous line appears at the end of the first episode and hints at the show’s own ethos as it attempts to make a beloved classic resonate with a contemporary audience. Short of changing everything, it does notably pivot focus and rework certain characters. The prince’s daughter Concetta (Benedetta Porcaroli), a minor figure in the novel and film, is given far more prominence and emotional depth here. And though much of her story centres on her rivalry with the radiant, unruly Angelica (Deva Cassel) for Tancredi’s affection, she provides a hitherto marginal female vantage point.Less welcome are the tweaks to Fabrizio. Previously depicted as a stoic, self-aware constant amid the tumult, the so-called Leopard now changes his spots in almost every scene as he oscillates between gentle gravitas and arrogant aggression, weary resignation and embittered rage. The result is to diminish the quiet tragedy of the character.That elegiac quality is perhaps what’s most acutely missing from this glossy adaptation. While there are still impressive set pieces — the battles for Palermo, the ballroom soirées — the defining themes of decay and mortality come coated in big-studio sheen. Where we should feel stifling heat, we are bathed in soft, glinting sunlight; where there should be dust, there is only polish. What we’re left with, then, is something that feels less like Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard than an Italianate Bridgerton.★★☆☆☆On Netflix from March 5
