“Let me show you a photo of my grandmother,” says Isabel Allende.
He disappears for a moment from his office to his home in Marin County, near San Francisco. Then she returns, her scarlet jacket and marbled scarf shining against the white walls. She holds a sepia photograph framed in embossed silver: the clairvoyant Isabel Barros Moreirahis mother's mother, her face placid, with dark hair and dark eyes.
The creators of the new adaptation of the series from Allende's emblematic book “The House of the Spirits” (the first three episodes of which premiere Wednesday on Prime Video) had not seen this photograph, but his grandmother could well be one of the actresses, Allende says. Many of the characters in “The House of the Spirits,” Allende’s first novel from 1982, are modeled after members of his family, including his grandmother, grandfather and mother. The story, known for its intense magical realism, follows three generations of women from the Trueba Valley through the turbulent history of a conservative South American country, inspired by Allende's Chile.
So, when the author watched the eight episodes (she is an executive producer but entrusted the showrunners with the adaptation), one of the first thoughts that crossed her mind was how much the actors were like the ones she had imagined them to be. It is in contrast to the 1993 film adaptation. starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons as characters loosely based on Allende's grandparents. (She has said previously that the film was a product of its time; people weren't used to subtitles then.)
But this “The House of the Spirits” is the first film adaptation in Spanish (and the first television adaptation, in fact) and is directed by three Chilean showrunners: Francisca Alegría, Fernanda Urrejola and Andrés Wood. This is the fourth major project of the creative partnership between Alegría and Urrejola, which they have dreamed of for a long time. some day adaptation something by the author.
1. Fernanda Urrejola, center, is co-showrunner and also plays adult Blanca in the series. 2. Francisca Alegría, co-showrunner and director of “The House of the Spirits.” 3. co-showrunner Andrés Wood, who also directed. (Diego Araya/Prime Video)
“In a way, it was a kind of magical realism, because we were looking to adapt some of Isabel Allende's novels, but we never imagined 'The House of the Spirits,'” says Urrejola.
The reason was that someone else already had the rights: the entertainment company FilmNation. But in June 2020, FilmNation asked Alegría and Urrejola to adapt the title and set out to compile the show's bible, including the script for the first episode, the entire season's arc, and the fact that it would be filmed entirely in Chile.
When Allende watched the show, she was impressed by the country's landscapes (the vast desert, green forests and farmlands, snow-capped peaks), its authenticity and flavor. “I saw what always should have been” she said in September at a series announcement event in Santiago.
After Alegría and Urrejola began developing the project, Wood joined as co-showrunner and director. (Urrejola also plays the adult Blanca Trueba). Wood said he first read “The House of the Spirits” when he was 15 or 16 in 1983, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, from which Allende had fled eight years earlier. The book was then banned and the dictatorship highlighted the political stories.
More than 40 years later, highlighted by the framing of Alegría and Urrejola, different aspects now stand out. “It is this type of book, in a way, that [is] “Classic,” says Wood. “And they are classics because they allowed us to reread them and they speak in the present. That is magic.”
That's why this series is so important right now, he adds: “Because now we're in a moment of crisis, where people are saying we want to annihilate society,” and not just saying that, but acting on it. “We are witnessing many atrocities [in real time].”
This particular adaptation closes the story with the character of Alba (played in her youth by Rocío Hernández), the granddaughter of the clairvoyant matriarch Clara del Valle (played in her old age by Dolores Fonzi) and the conservative and volatile patriarch Esteban Trueba (Alfonso Herrera). The first episode begins with Alba, bruised and battered, returning to her grandparents' house, the house of the spirits, to reconstruct what led her to her current state.
Rosa (Chiara Parravicini) and the young Clara (Francesca Turco) in “The House of the Spirits.”
(Diego Araya/Prime Video)
“That's why we chose to start with Alba, who is the granddaughter who can begin her healing process by understanding her family history,” says Urrejola. “It's about memory. It's about recovering what happened before to not repeat the same mistakes or to learn and also understand why things happen. Nothing comes from nothing.”
Memory, in this story and elsewhere, serves as a tool for healing and change; Allende herself found catharsis in the act of writing the book. In 1981, when Allende was writing “The House of the Spirits,” she was working as an administrator at a secondary school in Caracas, Venezuela, where she lived in exile, blacklisted by the Pinochet government after organizing safe passage for refugees. She was working 12 hours a day and going through a series of changes: Her marriage was collapsing, she was about to become an empty nester, and she was about to turn 40. She felt frustrated, angry, empty.
“Writing the book, at night and on weekends, gave me purpose, kept me engaged, focused, entertained, remembering, remembering, trying to put it all out there,” she says. “And in the end, I felt like I had it. I had my past, my family, my country, my home there. It was like a brick, and I had it. So there was a feeling of: it wasn't going to be lost. do have roots “I have memories and they are here on these pages.”
“The House of the Spirits” spans half a century, including the coup that replaced a socialist president with a military dictator, based on Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet, respectively, although neither of them is ever named. (Salvador Allende was the cousin of Isabel Allende's father). After the coup, in history and in reality, opponents, civilians and those considered suspects were regularly kidnapped and tortured. To better understand what these people went through, producers interviewed several female survivors who suffered torture under the regime.
“Even in the worst and darkest places, these women found humor and these women found love,” Alegría says. “We always find what Isabel Allende says… That within tragedy there will be love, within passion there will be pain… And that work of active search in our memory, in the memory of our country, in the memory of these women, was very important for us.”
More than 40 years and 30 books later, Allende's work runs through the same themes like stitches in a tapestry: family (both blood and chosen), resilient women, the terror of absolute power and violence, but above all love: the love of a place, a country, justice, the love of women for other women. These are the same aspects of “The House of the Spirits” that remain most relevant today, Allende says. “And why are we saved, as humanity? Because of love.”
Adapting a sacred and revered work of this scope, spanning decades and generations, brimming with magical realism, was, of course, daunting for the showrunners. To calm themselves, they often returned to the warm lifeblood of the story: relationships, especially those between women, like that of Clara and her sister-in-law, Férula (Fernanda Castillo). Their relationship has no label, and Isabel Allende did not explicitly identify Férula as a queer character, but the subtext was there.
“We simply have a beautiful and sensitive relationship between two women who, in the adversity of living, of this violent world, represented by the man who is between them, in a way, still find their own ways of giving each other support and love, no matter what happens,” says Alegría. “When we look at each other with eyes of compassion, we can dialogue, we can love, we can forgive and we can treat each other as human beings.”
