13/10/2023 - Kim Rossi Stuart plays a gentleman thief in the Prime Video series, which is part-Italian-style comedy and part-US heist movie, and which tells the story of the sensational “Antwerp Diamond Robbery”

The first thing Kim Rossi Stuart does is look straight at the camera and talk to the audience. The fourth wall is broken down, as is the fashion today. Next, come all the must-haves for the genre: a breakneck pace, freeze frames, overlayed text, slow-mo’s, speedups, zoom-ins, split screens, pop music, flashbacks and flashforwards, and a geographical toing and froing between different cities. A long-awaited incursion by the Italian series world into the heist genre – courtesy of Prime Video and available on the streaming platform worldwide from 13 October - Everybody Loves Diamonds isn’t lacking in anything, least of all a bomb-proof story about the “Antwerp Diamond Heist”, the biggest diamond robbery in the world, which took place on Valentine’s night in 2003, within the impregnable vault in the World Diamond Center in Antwerp, Belgium, courtesy of a group of Italians led by the visionary Palermo-born jeweller Leonardo Notarbartolo. It was a seemingly perfect heist, which earned them 150 million dollars and which left everyone open-mouthed.

But “dreams come at a cost”: following a trivial oversight, Notarbartolo was captured just a few days later, and that’s where the series directed by Gianluca Maria Tavarelli begins, reconstructing, but also often romanticising, how this unsuspecting man managed to slip inside the Mecca of diamonds and pull off the robbery of the century. Everybody Loves Diamonds - whose first two episodes of eight were shown in a press preview - is indisputably captivating. Shot in Italy and Belgium, with considerable production resources and an international cast (speaking in Flemish, Italian and English), the series sees Rossi Stuart (awarded the David di Donatello for Best New Director via Along the Ridge [+see also:
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We won’t give too much of the plot away, which is worth waiting for and in which nothing is at it seems, except for the fact that Leonardo has had a gift for theft since childhood and has always dreamed of doing something extraordinary; that his contact at the World Diamond Center is a shrewd Jewish diamond trader (Elia Schilton) for whom he works as a driver; and that to pull his incredible ambition off, he turns to three unlikely champions: alarms expert Ghigo (Gianmarco Tognazzi), locks whizz Sandra (Carlotta Antonelli) and super hacker Alberto (Leonardo Lidi), while Leonardo’s wife, Anna (Anna Foglietta), initially oblivious to her husband’s double life, also promises a surprising evolution in successive episodes. The cast further includes Belgium’s Johan Heldenbergh (in the shoes of Detective Mertens), Norway’s Synnøve Macody Lund (as the director of the World Diamond Center) and an unrecognisable Rupert Everett playing the part of the cynical international lawyer who defends the interests of those whose safety deposit boxes have been ransacked.

With the stated intent of lending the ensemble a comic book feel, the challenge, for the director, was to find the right balance of realism, as befits the event, without ever sliding into caricature, a tricky task which the director doesn’t always manage. But if the aim of the series is to grab viewers’ attention and pique their interest for what comes next, then it’s clearly a case of mission accomplished: after watching the first two episodes, viewers will find it hard to wait to find out how the whole thing was ever possible.

Everybody Loves Diamonds is produced by Wildside (of the Fremantle group).

(Translated from Italian)