#586
Mafin get the opening sequence of the episode, mellow and talking about work and interior decoration in the Casa Grande kitchen – Fina apparently left her suitcase at her new place and turned right back around?
There’s daylight and coffee, but the warmer color is in the fruit bowl in the foreground, not in their clothes, as they sit behind their cups at a distance, and what they should be instead is wrapped around each other upstairs in the guestroom for just five more minutes, or at least sitting right next to each other, stealing bites off each other’s plates in between breathless looks at being back together. But that’s not where we are.
There is a lot of shadow (look at the sharp contrast bisecting the wall in between them!), with bright light only on Fina’s face, and Marta is muted.
At least they get to be annoyed at Tasio together and the scene mainly seems to serve as exposition of Marta finding out that Paula works at the factory now. At least it had bonus Fina?
Fina later gets mentioned as a photographer by Begoña, who is thinking of family photos, which seems deliberately placed – either to remind audiences who Fina is, or to let Beatriz know.
Marta lays into Tasio for cheating and employing Paula around the factory, and then storms into the office she shares with Cloe, with whom she has slept, and whom she has rehired for the PdlR 2.0 relaunch, and they end up talking about blurring borders between the personal and the professional, and it’s another neon sign I don’t like.
Yes, we knew the first time around what would happen and sat through it, and we’ll do it a second time, but, just like back then, I wish we didn’t have to.
Cloe saying that Tasio seems the kind of guy “who would stumble twice over the same stone”. Then cut to Marta. Uhm. Yes. No thank you.
Marta venting her frustration more openly with Cloe (who sits on her desk) than with Fina (around whom she is walking on eggshells). No thank you.
Marta promising “sometimes, the unexpected happens.” No thank you. (well it’s going to be Brossard dropping dead and Damián doing some maneuvering around the sale, I assume, but that’s not going to be the only thing.)
Quoting “Je ne regrette rien” with the Wrong Flutes (00:18:44 in the Mafin Drive Cut) in the background. No thank you.
I think we all got the point. And I guess it takes this degree of hammering home and playing up the fondness between them and draining the color out of the breakfast at the beginning of the episode in turn to get this to selling point at all.
It has been established that this is a dead horse, and it has been buried. And now we’re going to dig it back up and pretend it isn’t dead? And will invalidate earlier convictions? Invalidate the earlier writing setup? Really? (the Marketing department will have realized this is a surefire to cause drama and engagement. Enough to try to pull a 2.0. And it works. I am still writing lenghty meta posts.)
Bianca must be just around the corner, too.
Next rung on the ladder: Marta is harsher on Paula (Paula, who suffered poverty and homelessness and hunger, much like Fina may have in Argentina) than ever-empathic Andrés. And even in that scene: muted colors.
A central lure of Mafin has always been the inevitability with which they have been written and portrayed. Now they feel casual. Two episodes ago, there was perfect flirting and teasing, but it was an opportunity given, not a moment fought for. And it is not present in that muted breakfast that opened this episode.
Perhaps the Writing Room will pull another twist out of their many hats down the road to say, “See, they were never casual at all. Fina was just so burned. And Marta was so scared”? They might. (I hope so. Unless this is to have them look at each other again with inevitability, why are we even here?)
But I guess that is why we got the Garden Eden moment in episode 584. Now we are playing at paradise lost. Now – and there are two ways to look at this – the heterosexuals take over the guestroom with its garden décor, not a day later, and get it on, on that same bed (for a minute, before Valentina’s trauma rears up and I appreciate how the show doesn’t gloss over that).
On the one hand, that’s a glaring double standard in depiction, and an overwriting of this very space, from queer insinuation to straight facts. On the other hand, it also serves as a commentary on that same double standard: Andrés mentions Fina, as “she’s like family”, Valentina is given one of Fina’s blouses, it is that same bed, and it is an echo of what happened here and could not be shown, and it is also a commentary on the trauma in the background because Fina is still evading Marta.
Now, I presume, the squinting starts.
The one where “I want you to be my wife and I would do anything, anything to be with you,” where “I would live under a bridge if it were with you,” where “absolutamente todo,” where “I will take care of you until the end of my days” have been suspended (and that means they have been taken away, because you cannot suspend the inevitable).
And now, it’s “All right, so, logistically, if we have both actresses for another season and since their characters have a lot of weight and they deliver stellar performances and cause lots of engagement, we now logically need to write them thoroughly apart, so painfully that everyone will doubt them, and then we could write them back together.” (if people still care by then. I see the names that stop appearing here, and it is a risky game.)
Sure, there are things left to enjoy. Performances, and outfits, and the occasional crumb or wink, even though it’s not (yet) the fun game of finding the torches that light the way.
And there’s the production side where the creative crews now get to play with the storyline, and not within the storyline, with more narrative license again. There’s the performers who are getting to do more range (I will continue to say that Brunet’s caged Fina is exceptionally well done), explore different character facets, and get a chance to eventually connect their characters differently, perhaps with more of that fabled freedom the show negotiates. But that's them, and not the audience.
For the audience, that’s “things to enjoy”. It’s not “inevitable”.