09/10/2024 - The Italian series born in the Citadel world is a moving, character-driven spy story, starring a surprising Matilda De Angelis

After playing the lawyer champion of women’s liberation in the successful Netflix series The Law According to Lidia Poët, 29-year-old Matilda De Angelis now steps into the skin of an amazing action heroine in Citadel: Diana, the new six-episode spy story landing on Prime Video on 10 October and the Italian branch of the world of Citadel, the American series starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas which last year became the second most watched Prime Video series outside the United States. The fast rising Bologna actress, discovered in Italian Race [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Matilda De Angelis
interview: Matteo Rovere
film profile] then seen in the miniseries The Undoing, puts to good use her 12 years of artistic gymnastics to perform breathtaking fight scenes comprising of martial arts, shootouts with somersaults and spectacular chases (including a zip line flight of almost 450 metres over the Cretto di Gibellina, the monumental environmental artwork by Alberto Burri in Sicily), mostly without a stunt double. But she also gives her character emotional depth, something strongly desired by the authors (the director is Arnaldo Catinari, already the director of Suburra: Blood on Rome, while the head writer is Alessandro Fabbri), emotions that the sophisticated spy Diana Cavalieri carries after a painful past but will have to learn to repress one way or another.

Iconic from her asymmetric haircut, created by hair designer Giorgio Gregorini (Oscar winner for Suicide Squad) and which symbolises a before and after in her life, Diana evolves in a hypothetical and retrofuturistic Milan in 2030, where the famous Duomo is reduced to a pile of rubble while Parliament discusses the militarisation of the city and the liberalisation of weapons following the American model. In short, the utopia of the spy agency Citadel, born many years prior with the objective of guaranteeing peace and safety for all citizens and then destroyed by its rival organisation Manticore, seems to have definitely foundered. Since then, Diana, an undercover Citadel spy (“you’ll become one of them, but you’ll remain one of us”, says her mentor played by Filippo Nigro, in one of many flashbacks), has remained trapped behind enemy lines as a mole in Manticore. And to escape for good, she will be forced to become the ally of the heir of Manticore Italy, Edo Zani (Lorenzo Cervasio), the son of the organisation’s boss, the implacable Ettore Zani (Maurizio Lombardi), which on its side fights for its supremacy against the other European ramifications of the agency.

The result of team work at the international level (the writers room of the original American series, of this Italian version and of the soon-to-be-released Indian one, titled Citadel: Honey Bunny, have never stopped collaborating), Citadel: Diana is nevertheless its own story, with its own style and cultural identity. It doesn’t overuse special effects, the characters remain at the centre of the narrative (in the cast, amongst others, we also find French actress Julia Piaton, Dutch actress Thekla Reuten, and German actor Maxim Mehmet), the action scenes are moving and three-dimensional, and the whole is immersed in the suggestive musical atmosphere by Mokadelic (the Rome band which already created beautiful music for Gomorrah). Based on the first two episodes that were previewed, Italy, usually not inclined to produce spy-action genre films, seems to have done its job in a more than dignified and well-focused manner.

Citadel: Diana is a series produced by Cattleya (part of ITV Studios) and Amazon MGM Studios, with executive production by AGBO by the Russo brothers; exclusively on Prime Video.

(Translated from Italian)