#589
How the creative teams work with contradictions to create layers.
While this was another Sad Coffee Date that will likely have been another step towards breaking up, it was a very interesting scene both in terms of dramaturgy and in terms of technique.
Writing Room, Directing and performers contrast dialog line contents with their delivery and with their use as stand-ins for other arguments here, which creates a careful mess (just look at the level of engagement and difference in takes at the liquor cart: lots of layering). The creative teams have likely had more fun cooking this up than I had first watching it, but it’s very good work that should get credit.
Before going into the scene, a few lines on the greater dramaturgical setup: the Writing Room (and Directing) are currently joggling two beloved show pillars. One is the Mafin relationship and its commitment, the other is the character of Fina that has centrally been coded as honest and empathic from the get-go.
From a writer’s perspective, I don’t think that the purpose is to topple these pillars, but rather to shift them temporarily out of balance to then reconfirm their place in the show’s DNA. This explains the extended display of both issues at the moment, and the way they are told creates heightened engagement because both issues (Mafin struggling in terms of commitment, Fina lying and acting without empathy) are perceived as nagging incongruencies by an audience that still lacks information as to how the characters got there. And that is really good work in terms of nourishing engagement.
Apart from this larger dramaturgical setup, the layers in this scene are created via contrasting impulses: the content of a line is affirming (e.g. “I am here because of you”), yet the delivery is impatient and reserved, and yet again the wider use within the argument is made out to be, by the character, about “Fina wants to be independent” whereas it actually seems to be about “Fina is not happy with where she is at the moment”.
Editing extends an olive branch and intercuts this Sad Coffee Date with Pablo and Nieves finding themselves in a new moment of rekindling their relationship, unexpectedly together again on a new level of commitment.
With that, into the deep at Toledo's only outdoor café:
Fina arrives twenty minutes late to a coffee date with a harried Marta. The world’s happiest dead fox seems to be freezing, but Fina only has eyes for her fabric samples since she went to the decór store instead of turning up on time for their date.
This is not a simple turnaround of “ha, Marta finally getting some payback for the many times she stood up Fina because of her job, how does it feel?” It’s messier than that.
Because Fina isn’t late because she had a last minute photography job, not even because she unexpectedly ran into a perfect photo motive with perfect light on the way: her tardiness has nothing to do with her career, and everything to do with prioritizing fabric samples and "my space!" over Marta, and that’s exactly the way it lands with Marta, who is worried in turn about losing her job and stability.
Fina wants Marta to like her home décor because she wants Marta to visit: “I hope you’ll visit a lot!”. Yet “visiting” is not “staying over” and certainly not a shared space. From which Fina chose to move out twice since she returned (Mafinca and Casa grande).
A space on her own that she can call hers seems the only thing that Fina is enthusiastic about at the moment – and that already casts a glaring shadow about how Argentina, and being pushed there, must have made her crave that – and, sure, that is about independence, but it is also about not wanting to need anyone or anything, and thus about keeping Marta at a distance, and Brunet gets both those messages and their messy entanglement across for Fina (which is great work, especially in looks, throughout this scene).
Fina wants to be left alone without being lonely: Marta as a comfortable tether who does not demand too much, while Fina can figure out who she is now and what she wants. On her own. With no infringement on her time or decisions.
Marta gives the wrong answer in saying that she’ll visit Fina to see Fina, not to see her couch cushions, because that brushes away Fina’s apartment and her enthusiasm about it as unimportant.
“Why don’t you want to talk about my apartment?” Fina asks, and the camera cuts to a seriously harried-looking Marta who hasn’t even been asked how she is doing.
Marta says she has other things on her mind, and Fina already sounds a little snappy when she says, “Of course. Work.” And that is a familiar situation: Marta often has prioritized work over Fina in the past (out of a sense of obligation, however misguided), and Fina reacts to that memory now, in a different situation.
Marta’s job future really doesn’t look rosy right now, and Marta herself doesn’t look too rosy, either, but Fina is immediately defensive, and here the interesting discrepancies start when Fina – not honest Fina “con la verdad por delante”, but cagey Fina – delivers a statement where the words convey one thing, but her tone another, and that is a manipulation tactic even if Fina doesn’t employ it consciously (Fina doesn’t come across as assured and intentional to me here, but as lashing out from a position of fear and insecurity).
“I think you are being very unfair, your worries are my worries, don’t you think otherwise!”
But Fina still hasn’t even asked Marta how she is doing, or what her worries even are.
The Empty Fifth Chords that have come to illustrate the growing distance between them are back when Marta apologizes and states she (she says “we” – which is not quite it) thought that nothing between them would have changed during their separation, that everything would have stayed the same, but that’s not the case, and Fina gives her a soft “duh” look.
Marta was used to Fina adjusting to her life and schedules; Fina seems adamant not to repeat that, but what could Marta adjust to now, if Fina doesn’t tell her anything beyond the fabric of a couch cushion?
Fina’s reply is interesting, and the delivery is, again, lashing out from a defensive position, very fight-or-flight: it would be strange *not* to change, “after having had to abandon your entire life and set up shop at the other end of the world, don’t you think?”
There’s a lot of anger simmering underneath that Fina seems to keep bottled up. And while there is an overall incongruency, for the audience, between “this is Fina as we know her” and “this is Fina’s behavior now”, there is a consistency to that incongruency (i.e. it’s not shoddy writing): Fina is constantly guarded, defensive, lying, deflecting, like an animal hunted. The one thing Fina avoids at all costs is vulnerability, and anything that would create vulnerability: honesty, openness, trust, commitment. An actual relationship.
Fina still hasn’t talked about what has happened to her in Argentina, or how she has lived through being forced there. She is not connecting much with her old contacts at the factory or the casa grande, and she seems to scoff with disdain at her earlier life. Her only safe place is her apartment, nothing and no one else – which Marta fails to understand, she still thinks they are each other’s safe place – and that may be the trauma Pelayo caused (which she has repeatedly refused to talk about when asked), but it may have gained additional layers in Argentina.
What that guardedness causes: a lack of empathy, or rather: an inability to empathize - with a waiting Marta who looks cold and miserable, or with a Claudia who is also about to lose her livelihood, along with many former workmates. But, couch cushions.
And Fina continues to attack instead of asking calmy: “So what don’t you like about it? Don’t you like that I am independent, that I have a profession? What don’t you like?!”
And the fact is that Fina had a profession before. One she fought for, one she was good at, one she enjoyed. One she took pride in. But it seems to be something else she pushes away – who she was before she was forced away. She certainly doesn’t seem at peace with it, or with anything.
“I like everything about you,” Marta replies, even though Fina doesn’t let her see much of it at the moment. She wants them to continue supporting each other, and Fina, this time, scoffs: “What, I am not supporting you?!”
And that echoes with “I left my life and moved to the other end of the earth for you while your life just went on comfortably”, but Fina doesn’t say that.
Marta admits that she’s vulnerable, that there are lots of changes, and Fina’s “I am very aware of that” comes with an impatient twist of mouth. Yes, Fina has lived through far more jarring changes, and she will not talk about them.
Around their searching Fragmented Love Motif (00:14:08 in the Mafin Drive Cut) Marta hopes that she is still the most important thing for Fina, which is Marta looking for assurance, but “our relationship” instead of “I” might have elicited a less reserved look from Fina.
Fina’s reply, in rewatching, registered as less cold to me than when initially watching the scene, which is also linked to the two motifs they are getting here on the sound level: first, the Family Chords Cadenza (as of 00:14:27) – Fina says, you’re the most important thing for me; Marta wants to know, “more than your cushions and your new job?”, and Fina’s answering eyeroll is laced with fondness, but there is Marta’s worry, that “everything else seems to matter more”, and that’s trying to put Fina’s opaqueness into words.
And Fina – which is great detail work by Brunet here – does a slow retreat into her shell: “I am here because of you” sounds more open still than “you are the love of my life” (but those family chords keep playing) and then the defensiveness is creeping back over “I’m sorry if my sheer presence at your side hasn’t been enough to prove that!” (it transports to me as if Fina wants Marta to acknowledge the sacrifice she is making, but doesn’t dare to ask for it, and framing it as a sacrifice in the first place is of course not ideal as a new start for a relationship).
Then, she doesn’t let Marta speak, and now the second motif comes into play, and it’s their True Flutes Love Motif (00:14:56), but the scene-concluding line Fina gets is loaded: “If you ask me for more, I will give it to you. Not because you ask, but because I want to do it like that.”
Now on the one hand, this could be read as “how about we openly communicate our needs, so we can adjust to each other?”
But on the other hand, Marta still looks doubtful (a little later in the episode, she will tell Andrés that she can empathize with him missing the complicity he shared with Valentina).
Fina has put the ball of “person who needs to do something to remedy this situation!” back in Marta’s court, and it’s another instance of saying one thing but doing another:
“Tell me what you want, and I will provide it” broadcasts availability and generosity, and that’s both things Fina isn’t prepared to give Marta at the moment (I assume because she cannot, as traumatized and guarded as she is – no one is the bad guy here, these two are just supremely bad at communication), and this moment shows it: Marta is explicitly asking for support here, and Fina is sidestepping that plea by saying, “ask for it” as if she hasn't heard it.
And “I’ll do it not because you ask for it, but because I want to do it like that” invites the question as to why Fina, if it depends on her, isn’t doing it already? Is “supporting my partner” a relationship service that has to be requested as an extra? Too laborous?
Of course this is made more complicated by the fact that Fina, before Argentina, has at times prioritized supporting Marta above her own wellbeing. Yet it also illustrates how Fina, now, holing up inside her couch cushion fortress, does not think of “supporting my partner” as something she would provide without question.
This is a very subtle dismantling – after dismantling Fina’s honesty – of Fina’s empathy, and the puzzle pieces are slowly forming a pattern, where the injustices committed against Fina still haven’t seen acknowledgment or reparation because she keeps them bottled up over fear and guilt. Something's gotta give. And it all circles back to one question: What happened to you in (and going to) Argentina, Fina?
