#mafin-adjacent

[newsfromthegutter]

Walked right up to this nice collection at El Rastro de Madrid, in La Latina neighbourhood.

[mrsdaphnefielding]

#497 - honorable mentions (3)

Ah, we are back to doomed gifts in the dungeons!

First Macbeth, now Anna Karenina? As in "turning into a villain out of ambition" and "throwing myself in front of a train out of desperate love"?

If I had a classics library and were in that writing room, I'd be having the petty time of my life right now. (honorable mention for the ongoing Madame Bovary references in Season 1!)

Seriously, what's it with the factory dungeons as a gift-giving location? They all seem to be pretty doomed. Or dooming. Marta would have enjoyed some comedy and a top hat (that's how I understood it, I swear on Marlene) instead of Macbeth, Cloe would certainly prefer not to throw herself in front of a train à la Anna Karenina.

Also, I'd like to note that I stand corrected: Valentina knows about Cloe's queerness and is accepting of it; she only doesn't seem to know about Marta yet. So Cloe now has a sounding board to talk about how gone she is for Marta (of which Marta is unaware). Dramaturgical device!

These two are sweet as friends together, with Season-3-rebooted "young and in love" Cloe getting to be protective and caring and reminiscing about growing up together.

Cloe is all but asking Valentina on a date here! A little pushy, and nervous, and then so giddy! She even calls it "genial"!(#ThingsThatDidn'tHappenDuringMacbeth)

Their friendship comes across as more cordial, more physically affectionate and more at ease with each other than the entire relationship of Cloe with Marta, and I wonder how much they play this up on purpose? (apart from Marta 'driving with the handbrake on' when it comes to her romance with Cloe).

If you told me they'd secretly meet in the dungeons to date while showing me this screencap? I'd believe it. Also Cloe gets to do the shirt-and-vest chivalrous thing for two seconds, while upstairs Marta has the gallantry covered.

But look at that "birthday dinner invitation" (and hey, Sound Department: I object to #WrongFlutes being moved from "Cloe has a thing for Marta" to "relationship letimotif: Marta stages a romantic gesture". There is just one (1) woman for whom I personally want Marta to stage romantic gestures and she now wears a bob and checked trousers):

Standing at a distance, both with the hands clasped together in front of them: not arms crossed, but still a barrier. Looks like a dinner invitation with the handbrake on. Also note how their dress is mostly color coordinated (white/black vs. ecru/black), but how again Marta continues with the sober lines and unicolors (this is the third of her gold pins I notice in Season 3: the leaf, some kind of berry branch, and this rose that is also in the Cabecera and harks back to early Season 1) while Cloe gets the flower prints and large patterns; often also more colorful.

Cloe has already promised Valentina to spend her birthday with her, Marta is sulky and petty about her galant gesture not being met with enthusiasm. (also, Cloe's threesome suggestion: "We could all go to dinner together! I am friends with both of you!" Uhm. MdlR out in public with a recent employee. I think not.) And even the Set/Prop Department has stuck a set of folders between these two while in the background, the coats on the coat rack make for an additional vertical separation that splits the frame into tiles.

To summarize: no aprons and no suizos and no riverside picnic baskets in sight.

[mrsdaphnefielding]

#494 - listening to SdL

This ep was big on tragic emotion with Juanito in continued peril, and the SdL sound department pulled two melodramatic/farewell leitmotifs from the soundbank that have been prominnntly used for Mafin before:

During the baptism of Juanito, starting over the anguished faces of the shows OG OTP, Andrés and Begoña, there are a little under 10 seconds of the melancholy piano tune that underlies Fina writing her farewell letter to Marta (ep. 378), and that also underlies Marta burning parts of her diary in late Season 2. The motif doesn't advance to the orchestrated variation here and shifts into another motif when the scene cuts to the phone.

Then there's the Melancholy Farewell motive known among the Mafin crowd as "Marta swaggers into the Warehouse After Hours instead of going to London and proceeds to call Fina Mi Mujer". Interestingly, it gets exposure - briefly, likewise only as the piano take, not advancing to the orchestrated version - while Marta muses what would be if Juanito didn't survive.

Those lines stood out (quoting from a conversation with @madronash here, and the from liquor cart meeting of the episode) for their callousness, and while it may have been a dramaturgical necessity to give these lines to just anyone so Andrés can reply with "I'd rather renounce Begoña than have her suffer through this", it may also be a commentary on Marta having suffered that deep kind of loss (not of a child, but of a partner, out of nowhere) and being marked by it.

Dark!Marta might be an obstacle for a reunion with Fina - who knows what they are foreshadowing? At least the musical layer does still allude to the pain, and not just to someone being more jaded by loss.