Global Courant 2023-04-11 07:46:19
This Monday the second season of the 2019 hit strip premiered, now set between the late ’70s and the ’80s.
It was not another premiere. The first chapter has just finished and it seems that the arrival of Argentina, land of love and revenge 2 (at 10:15 p.m., by El Trece) at prime time was experienced as something more than a traditional debut: the plot deals with the tree genealogy of the two central families of the original ATAV -with winks for the fans- and, in addition, it marks the return of Polka at dinner time. And on TV, of course.
In between, not only did the four years pass between one strip and another (the first began in March 2019), or the 50 that separate one plot from the other, but also the coronavirus pandemic. And, among the less dramatic consequences of the sweeping passage of Covid, which claimed more than 130,000 deaths in Argentina, was the absence of fiction on the traditional small screen.
That although it was not a dramatic consequence -in the context of health- it was a very hard blow for the industry. Polka had to suspend the recordings of Separadas when the quarantine was decreed in March 2020. And, from then on, Argentine fiction withdrew from TV (but not from streaming), and, over time, had solo returns, like El primero de nosotros, on Telefe.
Toni and Segundo, the central couple that make up Toni Gelabert and Tato Quattordio.
With which, this new landing by Polka was read as something that went beyond the story to be told, although, like all self-respecting fiction, it also played its hook in the previous one.
Different love, the same rain
Although he could not always comply to the letter, each initial chapter of a Polkian strip tried to have the first approach of the central couple and a torrential rain watering those feelings. This is how it happened this Monday, when Toni (the Spanish Toni Gelabert) and Segundo (Tato Quattordio), childhood friends, took refuge in a telephone booth from the late ’70s. They drenched, they attracted each other.
Toni is the grandson of the characters that in ATAV 1 made up Delfina Chávez and Albert Baró. Almost all the characters in this second season are related to the Moretti and Salvat who lived in the ’30s. Now, its predecessors move in the ’70s and ’80s, a period that is recreated, with emphasis, in all its details.
The plot written by Lily Ann Martin and Claudio Lacelli starts in 1977, in Buenos Aires, with that love scene between two friends. And 12 minutes later we were in Barcelona, 1984: with Toni in exile with his father (Rafael Ferro) and Segundo following the sociocultural mandates of his parents (Gloria Carrá and Federico D’Elía).
Darío Barassi and Andrea Rincón, in the golden age of the theater of magazines.
Toni’s mother was kidnapped at ESMA and had a daughter in captivity. All this, among many other filial data of each one, quickly became known through letters read aloud and background information on the characters, almost like a cover sheet.
That, together with a certain didactic spirit of what the dictatorship was and what the arrival of democracy meant (it never hurts to remember both facts, but perhaps moving a little from some common places in which fiction in general falls), turned the first chapter in a kind of review of the country with clichés of the time.
It is moving to see the journalistic archives of the struggle of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Virginia Lago composes one of them), but in the middle the magazine theater appears -with some characters inspired by well-known figures-, and several subplots that are proposed tell very different things at the same time, emphasizing the looks, the cars, the decorations and the characteristic elements of those years.
The Hills brothers, directed by Juan Gil Navarro and Barassi, figures of the Buenos Aires (and Mar del Plata) nightlife.
Hopefully, as the chapters go by, the new land of love and revenge will find the balance between substance and form. Fabric to cut has plenty.