The Mallorca Files: "The Maestro" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 17) at 9:45 p.m. I switched on PBS for the latest rerun of The Mallorca Files, a short-lived (16 episodes from 2020 and 2021) but quite charming British policier set on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain. The principal leads are Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys), a British-born detective, and her police partner, German-born Max Winter (Julian Looman). This episode, called “The Maestro,” kicks off with a long scene of a woman walking into the water at one of Mallorca’s beaches and drowning herself, and then cuts to an odd opera performance being held in an underground grotto with water inside. Two singers are doing the scene “La ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and they’re singing from matching gondolas floating on the lake while the audience – which includes Miranda, Max and Max’s local girlfriend Carmen (Tábata Cerezo) – sits amphitheatre-style on stands of chairs in front of them. Don Giovanni is being played by José Castaña (Carlos Magnusson), who’s a star of the local opera, though writer Dan Sefton wasn’t able to make up his mind just what sort of opera singer he was. In the opening José Castaña is shown singing the baritone role of Don Giovanni, but later in the show, after he’s been murdered with a single stab wound through the voice box, one of his old records is heard and it’s “Dalla sua pace,” an aria from Don Giovanni but sung by Don Ottavio, the tenor. (He’s also name-checked as a tenor in the dialogue.)

Since they’re already on the scene, Max and Miranda are assigned to investigate the case by their boss, Inés Villegas (María Fernandéz Ache), and the first person they suspect is Castaña’s widow Domenica (Cristina Castaño). They think Domenica killed her husband for his money, but she protests that José signed a will that disinherited her and gave all his money, including royalty income from future record sales, to a local charity. But Max and Miranda realize that the supposedly authentic will was signed by an autopen and was therefore almost certainly forged. Later Max and Miranda figure out that the young woman who killed herself in the opening scene was the daughter of José Castaña by one of his many extra-relational partners and Castaña was killed by the girl’s mother (who’s also the trustee for the charity to which José supposedly left his fortune) for revenge and because José never did anything – physically, emotionally or financially – for the girl he fathered by her. Only when they arrest her and she gives a signed confession, the widow also submits a signed confession – and so, in a plot twist Sefton obviously stole from the real-life “#MeToo” movement, do 25 or so other women, all of whom claim to have been seduced and abandoned by the beloved singer. Apparently José was as much of a Don Juan in real life as he was on stage, and he left all these women with a motive to want him dead. Inéz essentially gives up on the case, announcing that she’ll keep the investigation open and reassign it to other detectives but also that she can’t prosecute based on the multiple confessions and the lack of any forensic evidence to tell which of the women actually killed José and which are lying to cover for the real murderer.