Tied into that: the importance that is given to this arc. Marta' plotline frames the entire episode!
It opens at Pelayo's grave, picking up directly from the spectacular cinematic ending of episode 547, and it delivers the final scene and cliffhanger: Marta on the couch, staged lavishly by the Camera and Costuming (with references to 50 movie stars from A. Hepburn to Taylor to Charisse) as she dreams of Fina with her eyes closed, a bouquet of white roses in the background and the True Flutes (Falling In Love!) Motif swelling up.
This is not fanfic. This is happening on main. This is happening on my mother-in-law's TV screen every afternoon. With insane production values (this actress? In this set? With this sound design? Written as swoon-worthy lesbian romance for the ages? is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?)
But, the build up:
548 is also an episode of Darío being a (unaware, or rather: unreflected) dick. His soft-spokenness at times looks unaffected. He's just mellow-sad. Which is surprising, given that he supposedly just lost and buried the love of his life. Meanwhile, next to him, Marta is utterly destroyed by the absence of the love of her life (and by Pelayo having orchestrated that loss).
This parallel begs the question as to whose love story runs deeper, and also: whose partner loved back more deeply and unconditionally...? Yeah, no question there.
Darío might have moved to Mexico to be with Pelayo out of love. Fina, cut off from everything and everyone she knew, moved to Argentina to be without Marta, out of love.
And Marta, in contrast to 547, is answering Darío's outrageous "alternative facts" not in screams, but in looks and elegantly quiet lines. And she is having none of Darío's appeasement politics:
Darío (presumably to Clara, but it resonates with Marta): "Things get easier over time."
Marta's face: "B*TCH THEY DO NOT."
Darío: "Pelayo wasn't perfect."
Marta's face: "I will make you push away this marble slate with your bare hands just so that I can curse him AGAIN."
The "I am judging you just with a well-educated look" theme continues in the mirroring scene at the end of the episode, when Darío thanks Marta for coming to the funeral and Marta states that, if not for Clara, she would have liked everyone to know "what kind of person" Pelayo truly was.
Darío has THE NERVE to say, patronizingly, "it makes me sad that you hate him like this," and Marta at least gets in an "That surprises you?" (but in 548, it's softly ironic undertones, not open attack)
The "Are you f***ing kidding me?!" look:
The entire scene is built on Darío making appeasing claims, and Marta and the audience being set up to reject them and have none of it, with just a quiet line and an understated look:
Darío: "You don't want to hear this but he was not a bad person."
Ehm, no. You don't want to hear this, Darío, but idealizing your deceased husband won't makes his crimes or their consequences disappear! He was, in fact, a bad person.
Darío: "He committed an error."
Ehm, no. "Error" implies "no ill intent". Pelayo, however, had the illest of intents.
Darío: "Pelayo would have wanted you to be together." *melodramatic look to the heavens* "Wherever he is now."
One, Pelayo expressively did NOT want them to be together.
Two, don't look up, Darío, look down below if you look for him.
Three, it is an interesting choice in this dialogue to have Darío's attempts of rewriting the facts not outwardly protested. Marta's calm rejection is guiding the viewer reaction here, and it really doesn't take more than a raise of a brow. That's how strongly Mafin has been positioned.
Of course, before Darío leaves, he drops the bomb that Fina was originally sent to Buenos Aires ("Pelayo bought her ticket." - bringing up that cruelty again!). This disconcerts Marta who suddenly does not only have Mexico to search for Fina, but the world. Where Fina now seems to move comfortably. Good for her.
(The next two shots hold no analytical relevance. Just beauty.)
After the avoidance of culinary soap Camera in 546 and 547, it is baaaack in 548, and in full force: basking in the beauty of its sets and its performers as a separate layer that places the narrative at a bit more of a comfortable distance. (this is not a bad thing, or something to consider in hierarchies of aesthetics. It is simply a different approach to filming that is a lot more typical for telenovela or melodrama as a genre)
The focus on smoothly readable facial expressions is back, in faces that don't contort and don't move out of frame. Bienseánce! Instead, they are spectaclarly lit as if on a pedestal and invite the viewer's gaze to linger on that surface, while all departments deliver (this is not a complaint).
For the final sequence of this scene, we need to go off the deep sound end for a bit.
(Sorry, I haven't had to do hearing notation in years, not that I was ever very good at it, so this is very schematic in terms of rhythm and I also don't have a piano in reach at the moment so I cannot work through chords and harmonic structure)
Marta has a flashback of Fina that is introduced only through two brief cuts, after Darío walks out to the Tragic String Quartet dlR Motif starting at 00:46:04 (again, all time stamps referring to the Mafin Drive Cut).
We get one lavish, perfectly balanced profile shot of Marta lost in thought, her gaze turned right towards the lights instead of the dark bars-looking curtains lefthand behind her (and someone in that team knows their renaissance art canon, waving at @veganpepsibaby - not quite the Ghirlandaio, although it does play exactly with the "Florentine blond curls" trope, but with an edge of Botticelli's Young Man With A Red Cap, if that were in profile)...
And next, there is a brief torso shot focusing on the bouquet of white roses in the background which is a core Mafin symbol (Isidro, the Mafinca garden, the Mafin Home and shared life dream etc.), but which is not as easy to decode if you are not that familiar with the storyline. So the Sound Department ties this together by bringing two of the central early Season 1 Mafin motifs into this, in direct succession.
These two motifs are the True Flutes Love Motifs for Mafin - one, we might dub "Awakening (to Love)", the other "Falling in Love (Reaching Out")
When the image cuts from Marta's face to the rose bouquet and then segues into the flashback, we get the the four gently falling chords of True Flutes Awakening (00:46:23), underlined with piano, and lasting up until Fina imagines them watching the roses in their garden grow:
Then, at 00: 46:45, something interesting happens. I realized only in trying to write this one down that the characteristic "fifth drop and rise, then second up and down" second part of the True Flutes Awakening Motif has has been adapted, across the past months (!) as a recurring, quicker figure (sharper, no legato) of restless meandering that is given to Marta when she is trying to figure something out, or when a clue sails past her. A bit like a soundcue of her subconscious at work (this is, I think, not Mafin-exclusive, but it works as a specific callback for Mafin).
It is at play earlier in this scene, when Marta learns about Buenos Aires and thinks about how to find Fina, between 00:45:00-00:45:30, including a side modulation (spaced a bit more loosely than notated here, this is just schematics for the melodic line and variant):
The time-travel whoosh that closes the flashback is the next sound cue, after True Flutes Awakening finishes with a little arpeggio leading up to its concluding chord.
Marta then drops down onto the couch, in silence, but when the camera cuts to Darío's unopened letter on the table, the soundtrack moves into the True Flutes Falling Love/Reaching Out Motif (00:47:05) while Marta takes a deep breath and - as the sound level suggests - dreams of Fina, with the motif ending in a Glass-esque string swell:
Soon, Marta. Inevitably. (At least that's what the Sound Department says.)
