Sara – Woman in the Shadows (now on Netflix) boasts an odd gimmick – its title character is nigh-supernaturally gifted in the art of lip-reading. Which makes one wonder if we’re maybe starting to run out of ideas? Anyway, this six-episode Italian series, based on the mystery-novel series The Investigations of Sara by Maurizio de Giovanni, stars Teresa Saponangelo as retired intelligence agent Sara, who finds herself in a just-when-I-thought-I-was-out-they-pulled-me-back-in plot after her long-estranged son dies in suspicious fashion. Much of the pilot episode feels familiar, save for the lip-reading thing, so there’s a chance our protag lip-reads herself into and out of trouble in compelling fashion – let’s find out.
Opening Shot: Somewhere in Italy, it’s a dark and stormy night.
The Gist: “Total Eclipse of the Heart” oozes on the soundtrack as Sara (Saponangelo) sits in a car, glowering. She’s always glowering, to be honest. Apparently, she has a lot to glower about, but we’ll get into that in a minute, after she guns it and slams the car into a man crossing the road. Subtitle: A FEW DAYS EARLIER. The phone rings, awakening Sara in the middle of the night. It’s about her son. He’s in the morgue. She looks at the body. Would she have recognized Giorgio? She hasn’t seen him in who knows how many years. We see a flashback in which younger Sara argues with what appears to be her now-ex-husband, because she’s leaving him and their grade-schooler son. Why? Not sure, but I assume it has something to do with her career as a spy – a career from which she has since retired.
Sara stops to see Giorgio’s partner, Viola (Chiara Celotto), many months pregnant. Tense conversation. Giorgio was hit by a car near their home. She finds the driver, who says Giorgio seemed to throw himself in front of the car. Curious. Is Sara investigating this now? A retirement project perhaps? What was she doing prior to this? Sitting around with a blank expression, it seems, a blank expression that now conveys mixed and/or complicated emotions. She pulls some strings, gets her hands on Giorgio’s phone, steals the chip out of it, snoops around a bit. Yeah. She’s investigating. And she for sure has something to investigate, as some elements surrounding the death don’t seem to be adding up.
She meets with Teresa (Gerini), a former coworker who now leads the secret agency which exists in a secret office behind a secret door. Sara and Teresa have a PAST, it seems. Prickly exchange, with some begrudging respect and old baggage in the margins, if you want to read into it. Teresa agrees to help, but she ain’t happy about it. Giorgio was a researcher at a biochem facility, so Sara drops by and talks to his boss, then secretly follows him to a military base; later, she’ll don a ballcap and a onesie and pose as a vending-machine refiller person and sneak into the base to poke around. She dodges a metaphorical bullet or two, pulls on threads and never seems capable of pulling a mug that isn’t dour. And yes, we eventually get back to the moment where she guns it and runs a man over. But the why of it all? Patience, my friends. There’s five more episodes to go.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? You know how Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face character can somehow detect when people are lying? Well, Sara is kind of like that, except with lip-reading – albeit in an utterly humorless fashion. Otherwise, Sara has much in common with gritty, borderline (wannabe?) prestige crime-drama series that are plentiful on Netflix, e.g., Caught, The Snow Girl, Dept. Q, etc.
Our Take: Sara is most alive when Gerini and Saponangelo share the screen – their line readings are charged with a rich, deep vein of subtext implying past and present tensions and alliances (that are touched upon in a couple of brief flashbacks). Their initial greeting goes roughly, my you’ve aged and so have you, you just don’t look it. Teresa calls the graying Sara “brunette,” and Sara’s tonality screams “blondie” without coming out and saying it. They sure seem to have survived a lot of, well, something, appear to be opposite personalities, with Sara expressing the weight of the past via silent melancholy, and Teresa strikes me as someone who embraced moral and personal compromises necessary to the job in order to climb the professional ladder.
So there’s a lot going on between these two, amidst a reasonably compelling plot that has yet to give us anything particularly new or interesting, but hints at future developments expanding beyond the core mystery behind Giorgio’s death. There’s a scene in which Teresa appears to be having an affair with a younger gent connected to a prominent, apparently divisive Italian politician, opening a political can of worms that, per Netflix’s brief episode descriptions, will further emerge as the series progresses.
If Sara continues to explore these character dynamics, it’ll be a winner, a potential battle between two steely personalities hardened by the realities of their professional lives. The tone is firmly in the grim-noir sphere, with lots of poker faces and rainy midnights, and a title character who quite desperately needs to work through her depression. If we’re lucky, there’ll be a few let’s see her lip-read her way out of THIS one moments to enliven the series; if not, it might still be pretty good anyway.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Teresa looks up from her phone, after watching a video she took of Sara running the man over.
Sleeper Star: Wily vet Gerini (who American viewers may recognize from supporting roles in John Wick 2 or, uh, The Passion of the Christ) is the bold, brash counterweight to Saponangelo’s tight-lipped, oft-expressionless characterization of Sara.
Most Pilot-y Line: Teresa sums up Sara: “She thinks she’s dead, but maybe she’s not.”
Our Call: STREAM IT for the promise of more crispy interplay between Gerini and Saponangelo.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.