#547
All Hail The Queen.
...and Queen Mom:
Marta appears at the cemetery to deliver a performance fit for a queen (and while the cap chosen above is more elegiac, because the letters of "Reina" were legible there, the scene is much more than that register); Digna kills Darío with glaring daggers across the breakfast table and while maintaining a pleasant conversation.
Outstanding work by both Belmonte and Fernández in this one, framed by a Camera Team and Set Design Team that took no prisoners, either.
One of the contrasting themes of the episode was light and dark, starting off in the dark, with the renewed chamber duel between Darío and Marta across the dining table:
"I curse the day I married Pelayo": Victor Sardou has just entered the group chat:
This was tragedy more than melodrama in the dialogue, but it highlighted another central theme: the conflict of being a genre that is built on packaging high emotions in a very pretty manner versus a performance that strove beyond the pretty.
Marta rebuffing Darío started pretty here, in righteous indignance, but when the dialogue gets to the core point - Marta saying "he made me believe she didn't love me" - Belmonte allows her face to contort beyond the convention, and Directing let her do it.
The episode had several moments of high drama to deliver, but except for the cemetery scene, which was a show within the show (Marta playing the grieving widow), a lot of it was delivered intentionally awkward, vulnerable, and unafraid of being ugly.
That said: of course the camera work is still so sweeping and pretty. So working the gaslight vibe here with the flickering lights and the banister gleam.
Belmonte may be too much of a pro to bask in her character's outbursts, but the camera sure is in love with the work it gets to do on her. Just look at this walk up the stairs:
From dark, the radical switch to light: bright, cool orange, and a talk with the parents.
The camera goes for pretty initially...
...but shifts, moving past the elegiac and the elegance that is usually served and gobbled up:
The Camera Team loved the gaslight vibe so much that we get another neo-goth shot: the backlit window, the gaslight flicker, as the outline of Marta slowly descends the stairs, moving from the somber gaslight into the bright light of realization:
On sound level, the Romance Farewell Motif starts playing at 23:39, in full. Overall, the sound level is fairly typical in this episode, with lots of heavy, extended strings characteristic of melodrama.
At one point in the last eps, threads of this motif were transferred onto Nieves, and: no. Of course the Sound Department has standards tunes for standard melodrama situations, but these two story settings are not comparable.
But, of course, next to budget, that is intention: viewers will be aurally pavloved to affects on characters that have become part of their everyday, due to sheer exposure. And then Sound Design attempts to shift that attachment over onto new hires by using the same motifs (yeah, good luck with that. There are motifs you cannot uncue from Mafin for me, and that's that)
This transition into the light also brings the last appearance of the garishly bright flowers in their sinister gaslight color mode:
in the next frame, the lights are up like in an Almodóvar setup, with the performer ready to go:
Sidenote: There is a bit of that somewhat 90s/early 2000s Almodóvar vibe later at the cemetery, with the sunglasses appearance--
This vibe plays with the trappings of feminized affect and it uses (in the cinematic tropes, see early/mid Almodóvar) that pidgeonholing as a counter-weapon. The vibe is going for it, but pushing it up and over the top until it is camp, until the trappings are queered and shown to be props. (of course it is also a situation where non-dominant, non-heteronormative masculinities are discussed through women as a cipher, but how much are women actually discussed then?)
Marta's breakdown in 547 may include trashing the funeral flowers, but it is different from that vibe in that it doesn't go for camp. Instead, it highlights the vulnerable and the awkward, and that is a part of a performer's work where I always hesitate to post caps (even in the frame bits when it's film and not stage).
What Belmonte delivers here is not magnificient rage. It starts from a small wail ("Pelayo, no") and from a physicality that counts on awkward movements, too. In consequence, it looks as if coming from a place that isn't immediately winning which makes it that much more gripping (although we did get Marta's heel on Pelayo's throat. That was a win.)
Some of the - for the lack of a better word - congruency of this sequence comes, to me, from sizing and pacing it through stagecraft (even though screen work functions fundamentally different when it comes to sizing and pacing). There is no scenery-chewing even in this episode's outbursts; it comes across as too raw for camp.
Perhaps that is part of why it felt satisfying, in a sense of "earned" (for the narrative. I do not discuss viewerhip in terms of "earned"). I find it notable that Marta's breakdown kept eschewing the culinarism of the telenovela genre. It doesn't hinge on the double layer where a performer delights in, or showcases, their prowess.
Another important part of this scene is Fernández as the scene partner who gives an excellent assist (a task as hard as scoring, if on a different level):
So much of it is timing and scaling, to enable someone next to you, and every cue worked (just compare this give and take to the reveal sequence with Marta opposite Darío: experience, in years but also around specific colleagues, makes such a difference).
Please let these two be the core team of Operation "Bring Fina Home"! With how Digna immediately spelled out "Fina!" in that bright daylight couch conversation when Marta alluded to "the thing I treasured most in this world" makes me very hopeful. These two deliver fantastic work off each other.
In the end, when Marta sags and Digna calls her "mi niña" [my girl], we get a variant of the Pietà from five episodes ago, when Pelayo died in Marta's arms. It is so different when it is not female grief staged to highlight a man's body and subjectivity.
The contrast of high and low angles marks the scope this episode spans, on the mechanical level of camera angles. Several shots cowered close to the floor...
...one moved even lower, to six feet under (where Marta leaves Pelayo to rot)...
... and others moved high, all the way to the drone camera rising and rising above the open grave in the final shot:
One thing struck me about the burial scene on a narrative level. Among this oddball community of participants, the show is put on by Marta (and here it is about putting on a conscious show) for Don Agustín only, since everyone else (with exception of Julia) knows that Marta is gay. Everyone around her here knows that Marta's marriage to Pelayo was a lavender one, and that the relationship which has marked Marta is the one to Fina instead:
Darío and Clara know. Tasio, Andrés and Begoña know. Damián and Digna know.
Marta has her family behind her, here. And that is a beautiful thing when there are still too many burials happening where the family by law silences and supercedes the family found, and puts appearances over affect.
Some of the characters present in this scene know that the actual widower is Darío: Clara, Damián, Digna. And Agustín unfortunately seems to be getting a clue (but also how dare you bring Lorca. One, because even the most mannerist, symbolist, heady Lorca is nothing I want associated with Pelayo. And two, because Lorca in 1960 was only available in Spain in the abriged, censored "Obras Completas" version (printed in 1953), unless you saved your 1920s editions. I don't know whether "Alba" - which is the poem Clara tries to read and Marta then stops reading (good. Pelayo does not get Lorca. He does not.) - was part of it, but try to read that one as straight. I keep failing.
And finally, in terms of family, there are three people who know what Pelayo has done to Marta (and to Fina): one the one hand Darío, who is shifting uncomfortably at having to witness both Marta's pain and Marta's grace---
(btw, the funeral flower arrangement at the open grave? Old Perfumerías de la Reina color scheme. Pale pink rubbon, anyone? Set Design has our backs at every point.)
On the other hand, Damián and Digna know, which leads to undercutting the drama of the tomb scene with a bit of hilarity in their exchange of worried looks when Marta appears on the scene:
"How drunk is she still, can you tell?" - "Will she make a scene? Do you knock out the priest if that happens, and I make a run for it with Marta?" - "Can you bring around the escape car"?
Ultimately, though: these are already too many words on this episode. It gives me the sensation of talking over something, and I don't want to do that (and now that Marta knows in the narrative, now that people return to the tag and feel animated and post their reactions more frequently again, perhaps this "1 cap per ep" series that tried to shine a respectful light on the craft at work, day after day, can simply fade out).
Simply: this episode held a stellar performance (caught in great cinematography, too), and stellar not because it was built on coming across as pretty or smooth or nail-buffing, but because it refused to do that. (nevermind there were pretty and smooth and masterful moments too. There was a lot of scope in this one, and at the end of the day, it is still a soap). So perhaps the cap to stick with - in giving thanks for this performance and being allowed to watch it - woud be this:
And now, I need a drink. Because the work done in this episode was gripping and deserves a toast, but also because the work done in this episode really makes me need a drink.