The Vatican is not unfamiliar with the mystery of an empty tomb. Sadly, in the case of Emanuela Orlandi, the mystery remains unsolved. On 22 June 1983 Orlandi left home, carrying only her flute. Although she had asked her brother Pietro to accompany her to her music class less than a mile away, he declined, citing other commitments. To his eternal regret, the fifteen-year old never returned home. Her disappearance thirty-nine years ago has sparked one of the most speculated-upon crime mysteries in modern Italy. Over the years, ossuaries have been cracked open, mafia bosses have placed under suspicion, and conspiracy theories have proliferated at an alarming rate. None of the strands of investigation has proved conclusive, despite the exhumation in 2019 of two tombs inside a Vatican cemetery after to an anonymous tip-off. In the absence of concrete fact, who better to turn to than Netflix?
Directed by Mark Lewis (Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer), Vatican Girl, capitalizes on the eminently filmic aspects of Orlandi’s early life. A girl who grew up within the walls of the Vatican City and whose ancestors and relations had served seven popes, Orlandi is cast as a girl whose existence formed the very fabric of the Holy See; her disappearance, therefore, constitutes a form of blasphemy. Because of this sacred backdrop, few dramas have captivated conspiratorial Italians in anything approaching the same way. Lewis doesn’t so much present us with a list of prime suspects for the mystery as deluge the viewer with conspiracy theories, each one less credible than the last. Thus, not in this order, the KGB, the Russian mafia, the Italian mafia, Turkish terrorists – to name but some – are trotted out as potential suspects.
All this is crowned with the introduction of a new witness, who claims that Orlandi (who, remember, lived within the Vatican citadel) was sexually assaulted by a cardinal and that the secret was used to blackmail the Church. Add to this, Lewis dares, the fact that Orlandi disappeared on the day Pope John Paul II was in Poland addressing Solidarity followers (rumoured to have been funded by Vatican money with links to the mafia). In what must have been conceived as thorough investigative journalism, Lewis chases down every single conspiratorial rabbit hole before a final detective flourish in which none other than Orlandi herself is held to be a suspect in her own disappearance. We need only look to Lewis’s veneration of thriller-spinner Dan Brown to see that when it comes to separating fact from fiction, the latter may well tend to win out.
Once a genre relegated to Paramount’s Investigation channel, true crime has now moved firmly onto centre stage. Netflix’s Making of a Murderer (2015) proved just how irresistible the concept was to a wide audience, no longer ashamed to say they had watched it. Equally, platforms like Netflix have developed true crime into long-form storytelling over several episodes. Take last year’s hit TheStaircase, starring Colin Firth, which turns a whodunnit into a box-set style “experience” for the viewer. Where, then, are the real people in all of this? Forget the viewers, what about the lives and tragedies offered up for public consumption? Lewis doesn’t have much in the way of an answer to this; the interviews with Orlandi’s sisters and mother come over as little more than an afterthought to the juicier – and much more lucrative – business of conspiracy. The result, to my mind, is an indictment not just of Netflix but also of its viewers.
In 2013 Pope Francis declared that Emanuela Orlandi was “in heaven”. His remark – whether wittingly made or otherwise, in the context of a papacy that seems to thrive on the off-the-cuff comment – has been interpreted by members of the Orlandi family as a tacit acknowledgement of the Holy See’s involvement in the teenager’s disappearance. Such involvement has never been proved but the Vatican’s embroilment in the case has elevated the crime to a more profound level of intrigue that speaks to the unspoken agreements between Italians and the institutions – the Holy See, the Mafia, family – that define, and also undermine, their national character.
Emanuela may tragically be dead, but the quest for the facts surrounding her case continues. Let us hope that by the time the facts do finally come out – if at all – Netflix will have moved on.
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