Valeria is a writer in crisis, both for her novels and for her husband and the emotional distance that separates them. She takes refuge in her three best friends: Carmen, Lola and Nerea, who support her during her trip, immersed in a whirlwind of emotions about love, friendship, infidelity, family, work, worries and dreams of the future.
With this premise today it reaches Netflix, May 8, ‘Valeria’, her new Spanish series, adaptation of Elísabet Benavent’s successful novels of the same name. Starring by Diana Gomez (Valeria), Silma Lopez (Lola), Paula Malia (Carmen), Teresa Riott (Nerea), Maxi Iglesias (Victor), Ibrahim Al Shami (Adrian) and Aitor Luna (Sergio), the fiction produced by Plano a plano transports viewers to the bustling streets of Madrid in a sort of ‘Sex in NY’ homeland which, unfortunately, falls with (almost) the entire team in a disastrous first episode.
Alberto Barranco
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‘Valeria’ faces the personal conflicts of four friends who are not going through their best moment, either because of their complicated sentimental and family situations or because they do not finish finding their place in the world. Thus, the series explores the jealousy, frustrations, desires and longings of its protagonists, but it does so through characters that do not finish taking off as a result of the questionable interpretations of its protagonists and scripts that border on embarrassment on several occasions (It is hard to believe that this scene on the terrace passed the cut in the pilot).
In addition, the aesthetics of the four girls is so diverse that, instead of being representative of his generation, he ends up achieving the opposite purpose: he sins of artificial, an aspect that does not help to finish empathizing with some characters presented as little mime.
But despite these important questions, ‘Valeria’ manages to channel his story little by little with the passage of the episodes, finding both the tone of the performances and that of his script, leaving behind that embarrassment to offer a fiction that presents his great success in taking advantage of the possibilities of Madrid.
Madrid, the great protagonist
Although ‘Valeria’ is about the conflicts of these four friends, the great protagonist of the fiction ends up being the setting in which they take place: Madrid. The city permeates each and every one of its sequences, becoming the best value of the proposal.
The heat of the capital in summer, the nightlife of Malasaña, the bustle of Gran Vían, the life of Chueca, the difficulty of finding a flat, the hustle and bustle of public transport, the complicated job prospects … ‘Valeria’ captures the essence of Madrid and takes advantage of it to shape its characters, as the engine of its conflicts and, through his eyes, with all the good and the bad that the city offers them, he manages to make the viewer fall in love with the city.
His portrait of Madrid combines the aspirational aspect of the great city with the troubles that life in the metropolis entails.
Playing to find where each scene is located, identifying shops and bars, seeing yourself reflected in their situations, in their daily lives, or soaking up the possibilities of leisure and culture that Madrid offers from the hand of Valeria and her friends is, by far, the most exhilarating aspect of the series as her characters finish finding their voice in a city that gives and takes away from them in equal parts.
At a time when Spanish fiction takes advantage of the particularities of its territory more and better for the development of its stories (‘Plastic Sea’, ‘The Hunt. Monteperdido’, ‘Hierro’ or ‘Néboa’, to put some examples), ‘Valeria’ takes advantage of Madrid as the constant that shakes the life of its protagonists, a portrait that combines the aspirational aspect of the great city with the troubles that life in the metropolis entails. For all this, the future of the series must go through keeping the city at the heart of the story with the same care as in this first season. That is, so far, his greatest success.
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