It’s already almost commonplace for documentaries on platforms to address issues that got ink flowing two, three, four decades ago. So it was only a matter of time before the darkest episode in the life of Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, son of Italy’s last king, Umberto II, was considered one of the blackest sheep of European royalty. The episode: the shooting on the island of Cavallo in Corsica that resulted in the death of 19-year-old German Dirk Hamer on a fateful night in the summer of 1978.
The story is well known. A group of young people were staying in a couple of boats on the Corsican coast, near Víctor Manuel’s exiled summer residence, and he came with a gun to confront them when he discovered they had boarded one of his boats without their permission had used. The heir to the dethroned king shot twice and ended up in the water after a confrontation with the owner of one of the boats, doctor and playboy Nicky Pende. A bullet lodged in the thigh of Hamer, who was resting in a boat and would die after undergoing 19 surgeries and amputation of a leg.
What makes The Prince Who Never Ruled even juicier is the fact that it includes the testimonies of both the victim’s family and Víctor Manuel himself and his son Manuel Filiberto. And that despite the fact that behind the cameras is the journalist Beatrice Borromeo, an aristocrat by birth, member of the Grimaldi family since she married Carolina de Monaco’s third son, Pierre Casiraghi, in 2015, and has faced the Savoy family for years. Just because of this story. His mother, Paola Marzotto, is one of the best friends of Birgit Hamer, the deceased’s sister, and has accompanied her on her quest for justice for decades. “I grew up with this story,” Borromeo says via email. “It shaped me as a person and probably made me want to have a voice, and if I became a reporter after college, it was mainly because I wanted to be able to do something about stories like this.”
Beatrice Borromeo, 2019 at the Rose Ball in Monaco. VALERY HACHE (AFP)
Available on Netflix, the miniseries juxtaposes the way the incident shattered the lives of the Hamers with the way it impacted that of the Savoys. The struggle of the former, especially the sister, to bring Víctor Manuel to court and the struggle of him and his wife Marina Doria, with all the means at their disposal, to exonerate the heir who never inherited and against whom only in 1991 the Trial was made 13 years after the events. In the three episodes, the production deals with a legal case marked by the laziness of the French authorities in the investigation and an insolvent investigation, in which the defense manages to raise reasonable doubts that nobody at the beginning existed. That the night of the proceedings, in addition to the two gunshots, was heard the detonations of the gun salute fired by other nearby boats to warn of the gunfight was used as an indication that there may have been more gunfire , and the fact that there was also a pistol on the boat that had been used recently, and the accidental loss of the projectile that killed the victim, raised suspicions that it might not have come from the defendant’s rifle. All in all, despite the large number of witnesses, many of whom were now called in front of the camera, who claimed to have heard two shots and not seen another shooter. Víctor Manuel was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to only six months in prison because he did not have a gun license.
More than a decade later, the Savoyards were able to return from exile and in Italy Víctor Manuel was arrested and accused of corruption and pimping. The matter came to nothing, but the prison recorded him telling his cellmates that he had misled the French courts. Birgit Hamer fought for years to see the video. He succeeded in doing so, although he failed to reopen the case, and Borromeo published it in 2015 in the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, where he was working at the time. The Savoys filed a lawsuit and lost it. In 2017, in an interview with Vanity Fair following this verdict, the journalist described Víctor Manuel de Saboya as “a murderer acquitted by the French judiciary”, and about the son Manuel Filiberto, a regular face on Italian television, said that “he squeezes”. as much as his last name can because he doesn’t know how to do anything else.” “I’ve written a lot of articles about them and they hate me,” he added. “This time, however, I was much more interested in who Víctor Manuel is as a person,” she says now.
How did you both get involved in your documentary? “It took me a long time to convince Víctor Manuel to meet me,” explains Borromeo. “I wrote him many letters, contacted everyone we knew together and finally managed to meet his son Manuel Filiberto. I explained to him that I really wanted to hear his point of view, to tell all aspects of this man’s life and that I would also try to find moments of empathy.
According to Manuel Filiberto, the documentary filmmaker wrote to her father, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of her life over the past few years, and I began to have an uncomfortable feeling that I hadn’t been right, that I had gotten too close to her,” in part. if you weren’t listening Both would have agreed to participate, he assures, without involved lawyers, prepared questions or previously “arranged matters”. His father simply “opened his heart, his feelings and the doors of his house” because “he had and has nothing to hide”.
In the miniseries you listen to each other. And it shows in a tangible way how parents’ sins and tragedies affect their children and beyond. But as happened in “The Prosecutor, the President and the Spy,” the documentary Justin Webster dedicated to the death of prosecutor Nisman four days after Cristina Kirchner was accused of conspiring with Iran, the fact means that all theses are exposed are, not that they aren’t. No conclusion is drawn: the dialectic construction of the story simply invites the viewer to be the one to take them out rather than give them chewed up. Both in terms of the personality of Víctor Manuel, who, after denying that he said what the video shows, concludes his participation in the shooting by inviting everyone to the champagne, and in terms of what is in happened that night in 1978, and the maneuvers that marked that process.
Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, March 2003 in Naples.ANSA
The director says the documentary changed her mind about the Saboya. “Today I have a lot of respect for the way Manuel Filiberto decided to face this story and find closure. And I also believe that denying the truth ultimately ruined Víctor Manuel’s life because he was never able to turn the tide.” But that the miniseries’ fallout has worried the House of Saboya is clear from the statement released Thursday by Manuel Filiberto, in which he avoids the importance of the production: “The documentary is here: you like it or not, and I like it.” I don’t want to get to the bottom,” he says, but criticizes that the Premiere was used to question the innocence of his father, an 86-year-old man whose poor health he says “no longer allows him to defend himself.”
Borromeo reserves a pill for the end, almost in the vein of those post-credits scenes in Marvel movies that anticipate elements of future films, in which Víctor Manuel talks about another episode involving a member of the royal family, a gun and a fatality: the accident that killed Alfonso de Borbón, brother of Juan Carlos I. “I was there,” he says. “He repeated this story to me and other members of my team, acknowledging the similarities between the King Juan Carlos incident and his own,” explains the director. “I think he explained it in such a way that we fully understand the system he grew up in, so I felt like I was sharing the same information with the public,” he adds. And he concludes: “I didn’t do it lightly, I understand how delicate it is, but it’s just a fundamental piece of the puzzle to fully understand the decisions of a monarch that never was.” Whether Borromeo dem It remains to be seen whether another documentary film will be dedicated to the Emeritus King in order to continue to deal with the decadence and dark side of the European monarchy. Currently she has announced that she is preparing a series of films, this time with an epic tone, about the origins of the Grimaldi, together with her husband and her brothers-in-law Andrea Casiraghi and Dimitri Rassam.
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