ATTENTION: avoid continuing reading if you don’t want to have spoilers about Litvinenko: Investigation into the death of a dissident.
The miniseries in four episodes produced by ITV Studioson air Sky Atlantic and available in streaming are Now it is based on a true story.
What we see broadcast is based on extensive research, interviews and public testimony. Some names have been changed. Some scenes and characters, fortunatelywere created for film adaptation purposes. Fortunately that something, by and large, was made up because these four installments they are cold and sharp as a knife blade and they hurt.
Alexander Val’terovich Litvinenko he is, apparently, an ordinary man returning home. Before opening the door he observes his wife from the street, Marinaand the son, Anatoly, who are doing their homework. She tenderly observes them for long moments because they are all she has, there in London, her homeland in exile.
During dinner Litvinenko has something to celebrate. Finally, the clerks of his Majesty Queen Elizabeth II declared him and his family British citizens. Never a joy, as they say in the jargon. Litvinenko, in fact, during the evening begins to feel severe stomach pains which lead him to reject the supper and with it blood. You don’t have to be a doctor to understand that something is wrong.
Two weeks later Brent Hyatt e Clive TimmonsScotland Yard agents reach the bedside of the man, now unrecognizable. He is thin, pale, with no hair or eyebrows. Attached to the medical machinery, he answers the investigators’ questions in a whisper. He confesses to having been poisoned, clearly indicating who the instigator is. In no uncertain terms, outspoken. Litvinenko points the finger at a precise, powerful, dangerous man.
The investigators rightly have their doubts but something, in the Russian’s eyes, in his way of speaking, in the firmness with which he accuses, convinces them that the former agent of the KGB and subsequently FSB he’s not lying, he’s not a mythomaniac looking for attention.
The two policemen then begin to collect Litvinenko’s statements. They meticulously record the day and time during which the interrogations take place, trying to reconstruct what apparently it started out as a happy day but that ended in the worst way, with a rush to the hospital.
Litvinenko, although overwhelmed by a lethal disease that literally devours him inside, is precise, provides details, makes his last hours useful so that the English police can investigate his imminent death. He has no fear per se because he is a killer, he admits it himself. He fears, if anything, retaliation on his wife and his son but the denunciation he is making to the world is of such magnitude which is beyond the lives of mere mortals because it strikes at the heart of Russian political power.
Sasha Litvinenko’s story is true. In the December of 2006 newspapers all over the world began to talk about this man, lying on a bed in a London hospital, emaciated and suffering, bare-chested and with that green sheet behind his back. As often happens, they spoke well and spoke badly of it. Who sided with him and who, instead, branded him as a mythomaniac. Over the weeks the story became bigger and bigger, enriching itself with not just details. Until, one day, the world was given the weapons that were killing it: a teapot, some tea and some poloniuma radioactive material found in nature, especially in Russia.
The story told in the miniseries of Sky starts from these facts and offers the viewer the detective work of the London police. It’s not a thriller because the classic elements are all there. There is immediately a problem: who has to deal with the investigation? Since we are not in the United States, where every agency wants to have control of the investigation, the matter is quickly resolved. The two homicide cops who first took the dissident’s testimony will be integrated into a counter-terrorism team. There is immediate cooperation between the agents and no competition to get the lead. All come together to bring to justice the perpetrators of the murder of a British citizen, for all intents and purposes.
The detective part is very interesting. The search for place zerothe place, that is, where the poisoning took place, serves to reconstruct in detail who met Litvinenko. Once the place has been established, thanks to the testimony of the Russian, it is easy to understand who could be the culprit. All thanks to the high radioactivity of polonium that remains on furniture, teacups and even on the seats of the plane, coming from Moscow.
Once it has been established who is the perpetrator of the poisoning, it is necessary to interrogate him and it is at this point that things get really serious.
Litvinenko is now dead. He was buried in a lead coffin to prevent radiation from spreading into the city. The situation immediately refers to the burial of the firefighters seen in Chernobyl. Although the images are few, they are truly significant. The details highlighted by the skilful direction of Jim Field Smith they are moving, they give a sense of helplessness and provoke anger and frustration at the same time.
Strong emotions that also emerge throughout the trip of the British agents to Moscow. A trip that smacks of teasing from the first glance that the Moscow prosecutor’s assistant throws at the British investigators. A mockery that culminates, despite the profuse promises, with the delivery of invalid evidence for the purposes of a trial.
Litvinenko: Investigation into the death of a dissident is a series packaged very well. Although it was aired in a difficult period, it never lapses into easy propaganda, preferring to focus on the facts. The shadow of the Kremlin is omnipresent, it weighs like a boulder but none of the investigators in the field seem to care. And when investigator Brian Tarpey, in a hospital in Moscow, takes off his protective suit in front of the culprits, he makes a gesture that it represents the desperate desire to continue, against everything and everyone, in search of the truth.
The first episode is practically centered on Litvinenko, masterfully played by David Tennant (Doctor Who). The English actor is capable of intensely conveying the suffering of a man who he’s dying but he’s not done fighting. Indeed, right from the hospital bed he gathers his last strength to tell his story about him before being silenced by polonium. Despite being a story that is already known, the fatigue and torture that Tennant stages are so real that they make your skin crawl.
At his side we find Marina, his wife, played by Daisy Levieva (The Lincoln Lawyer). The surprising thing about the performance of the Russian actress is how slowly, minute after minute, you become the protagonist of the scene without practically doing anything.
Her figure is, at first, that of a weeping woman, sitting in the chair outside her dying husband’s room. But during the episodes it transforms and becomes that of a woman who doesn’t mind the political intrigues between Britain and Russia. She wants to get justice for herself, for her son and for her husband. And he moves with the caution of someone who doesn’t know which way to turn, between one threat and another. Marina fights against her Russian friends in exile who want her to be the banner of their struggle against the power of Moscow and at the same time she fights against her English friends who, once the case is closed, move on to something else.
Marina claims the right to life and happiness that has been denied and does so by making mistakes in good faith. The figure of her is human, earthly, very concrete. The look he throws at the judgmental English court is not one of those who implore and plead. He has dignity and conviction to spare.
Which are, then, the same arguments of the police officers in the field. Each has its strengths and weaknesses of him. They take the case with due seriousness and set out to obtain the best evidence to bring the perpetrators to justice. But not being personally implicated, other than Brent Hyatt, played by Neil Maskell (wonderful at Utopia), once their work is done I can’t do anything but wait and hope.
Litvinenko: Investigation into the death of a dissident has the very welcome advantage of being dry and to confine himself, as much as possible, to the facts. He doesn’t disseminate unsolicited opinions but, with what he has, he arrives at the most obvious and obvious conclusions: that against certain powers that be there is little that can be done.
The dramatization of a fact that, at the time, intrigued public opinion because it recalled those murders that are usually seen in the movies, is successful because it does not take the responsibility of acting as an emotional lock pick in such a difficult period. Choosing to tell a story without giving it a political connotation is commendable. It will not be a masterpiece but the series produced by ITV Studios it is interesting, entertaining, enthralling and intriguing just right to glue the viewer to the screen and leave him satisfied at the end of the vision.
