There is so much daring in “The Messiah” that it is difficult to define the portrayal of his talent. This series of seven episodes, some of which last more than an hour (Movistar Plus+ celebrates the first two today, Wednesday, followed by a new one every Thursday), represents a step forward in the career of Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, known as Los Javis, dar . Even those most skeptical of his celebrated career (from The Call to Paquita Salas or Veneno) will find a complex and mature work, an unusual approach to the traumas of the Catholic faith at its most messianic and unhealthy.
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The Javis launch without a network into a television fiction in which both Marian and extraterrestrial sightings of Mount Montserrat are possible; Opus Dei and the sects; Abuse of minors and motherhood understood as the beginning and end of everything. Between the paranormal and the earthly, “The Messiah” opens up into a bleak, very sad family drama that was created through the self-confidence and imagination of two creators with an astonishing sense for mixing references, symbols and figures from the popular culture of the 1980s the Millennial and Centennial generations. His look is able to combine rave culture with mass worship; Reality TV and Palmar de Troya with film classics such as The Sound of Music, Singin’ in the Rain or The Exorcist; or at the same time stroll through the territory of a tale of witches and wild fairies and ufological customs from such unusual films as “Holy Spirit” by Chema García Ibarra. The creative nose of Los Javis is able to combine, in the same cast, a television phenomenon like Amaia Romero with another counterculture like Albert Pla, without falling into the caricature or the insubstantiality of the cameo. Furthermore, from now on it will be difficult not to see the Catalan singer-songwriter as missal in hand.
Albert Pla, in “The Messiah.”
But beyond all the pyrotechnics, including the media, “The Messiah” reaches another dimension thanks to what happens at the core of its story. The series tells of the family trauma of two brothers during their childhood, adolescence and adulthood. It offers a journey in three temporal spaces that begins with the central character of the series, Enric, played in his adulthood by an actor a priori far from the orbit of Los Javis, Roger Casamajor, who literally conquers the city with his desolate look. Tragedy that runs through the entire story. Her eyes, like those of her fictional sister Irene (a Macarena García dedicated to one of her best works), express everything: loneliness, guilt and self-destruction. Casamajor’s profound interpretation is one of those that leaves its mark, and the connection between him and García and all their encounters represent the broken heart of a plot whose thousand parts are only fully reconstructed in the final chapter, perhaps the most problematic because of its conclusion Catharsis. , a spiritual apotheosis that is up for discussion.
Roger Casamajor, in “The Messiah.”
The Messiah features brilliant tonal and casting decisions, thanks to the deft combination of professional and natural actors, including all child and teenage actors. But Casamajor’s work goes one step further and offers such overwhelming moments as the drunkenness in the bar in the first chapter or the return of the prodigal son in Chapter 6, certainly the best of the entire series due to the scenic power of the immense Carmen Machi.
García and Casamajor are the orphans of this story, the victims of the love-hate relationship of a mother who is as irresponsible, cruel and selfish as she is all-powerful. A monster mother whose metamorphosis takes place in these three periods at the hands of the three actresses Ana Rujas, Lola Dueñas and Machi. Each of them adds new levels of horror and religious delirium to the character. She is a woman of tears and tears whose mother-child tenderness (Rujas) a la The Florida Project is diluted by her more tyrannical and moody streak.
Ana Rujas, in the series “The Messiah”.
Crazy, already in the shoes of Dueñas, she finds the glue for her wild matriarchy in the most eccentric and primal religious fanaticism, which is also understood as a physical and spiritual prison for her offspring, a son and seven daughters. And finally, she transforms into a wolf mother (Machi), able to complete the tragicomic adventure of transforming her daughters into the viral electro-pop group Stella Maris. This surreal band is at the origin of the project and was apparently inspired by the Catholic pop group Flos Mariae, seven sisters dressed as dolls who, behind their second rise to fame in 2014 (15 million views on YouTube), hid a terrible story of communication disorders and abuse.
Lola Dueñas, in the third chapter of “The Messiah.”
This whole crazy cocktail, which seems like a freak version of The Virgin Suicides, is told between visual textures that combine cinema with television and television with the YouTube era, a mix that works through a solid and careful structure in which Thriller and horror dance to the rhythm of a musical and a captivating drama of brotherly love. Because the big secret of this unclassifiable, difficult and risky series is that behind all its shiny generic and referential packaging lies an exciting and unexpected story of love and forgiveness. The Javis can move with astonishing naturalness between the LSD song of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and the melancholy Spanish folklore of Cecilia’s “Nada de Nada,” but if all this goes beyond that, it is because it is in the service of an eternal and human story: the desperate search for the life and comfort of two children broken by abandonment and fanaticism.
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