As a professional television critic, I am regularly asked, “What should I watch?” – a question I answer with the question: “Well, what do you like?” You can discuss the quality, the technique, the structure of a series in a relatively objective and analytical way, but taste is a matter of… taste. Some famous series that attract awards like a magnet attracts iron filings, although I could praise their craftsmanship and ingenuity, are simply not my thing. You may find them admirable but not exciting. Every critic knows the feeling.
In fact, if I had to catalog my favorite series over the years since I started thinking seriously about television, it would be filled with one-season flops, offbeat comedies, weird children's shows, and lo-fi art projects. (I'll make that list for you at some point, but you'll probably find “Food Party” on it.) I would favor the bright and charming over the dark and gritty, and stories of ordinary people over the rich and powerful: people who do things. instead of just possessing things, lovers, not schemers.
I am currently in love with “Land of Women”, a dramatic-romantic family comedy starring Eva Longoria and Carmen Maura (the queen of movies Pedro Almodóvar), premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+. I find it exciting not so much for its plot (which, in fact, is a bit of a thriller and doesn't always make sense in the real world) but for its luminous cast and the humble splendor of its setting, a town in the mountains northeast of Barcelona. (Admittedly, I'm a Spain fan.) It's the kind of story whose constituent parts have been changed many times over the years, most of the time with mediocre results, but when done well, as in the era Hollywood gold, and here, it can stay fresh for decades.
Gala (Eva Longoria), left, is a wealthy New Yorker who escapes to Spain with her mother Julia (Carmen Maura) and daughter Kate in tow.
(Apple TV+)
Longoria plays Gala, a wealthy New Yorker who opens a super fancy wine store. It is significant that she does not come from money, but she has adopted the color of the current environment, where she does not mind buying three copies of a haute couture dress without asking the price.
The money comes from her husband, property developer Fred (James Purefoy), but surprise, there isn't any. While Gala attends the opening of her wine store, she is approached by a pair of bullies, whom we come to know as Hank (Jim Kitson), the relatively bullier one, and Kevin (Amaury Nolasco), the comparatively sweeter one. . They let him know that unless this debt is paid in very short order, his daughter Kate (talented newcomer Victoria Bazúa) and his mother Julia (Maura) are as good as dead. And so, while Fred goes to places unknown, even to Gala, she takes Kate and Julia to La Muga (fictional), the Catalan town that Julia abruptly left half a century earlier.
As for Fred, we know he's going to prove disposable even before the most handsome man in La Muga, Amat (Santiago Cabrera), meets Gala at a car meet, when she drives his tractor off the road, spilling the load. of grapes that he was carrying; She is the only element of the town's industry, wine making, run by a women's cooperative. In their classic form, they start out as antagonists that the writers manage to keep around, i.e. they are potential love interests, and if this is predictable, it's also satisfying. It's no spoiler to say that Purefoy won't end up with Longoria, any more than Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard and Ginger Rogers would choose Ralph Bellamy over Cary Grant, Fred McMurray and Fred Astaire. I mean, you'd knock the screen down.
Santiago Cabrera plays Amat, Gala's love interest, in “Tierra de mujeres.”
(Apple TV+)
Dislocation piles on top of dislocation. Each woman, although they will literally be in bed together, has her own affairs to devote to. Julia, who knows about wine, has ideas about the local product (it stinks), which puts her at odds with most of the city, but gives her a mission. We are told that Julia is on the verge of dementia; She has a tendency to remember her flirtatious and free-spirited past, adding a touching element of time. Her former neighbors remember her, not necessarily well, and she has a grudge against her sister Mariona (Gloria Muñoz), but she looks at everything with wide eyes; Maura really seems to shine. And Kate, who like Bazúa is trans, deals with the absence of her father, his American girlfriend, and her cell phone, which Gala throws out the window in a fit of resentment. And problems, of course, will follow them from the other side of the ocean.
Created by Ramón Campos, Teresa Fernández-Valdés and Gema R. Neira based on the novel “The Land of Women” by Sandra Barneda, although they do not follow it, and performed mainly in Spanish, the series has a European quality, not only for its setting. , but in the simplicity of its production and rhythm. Its fairy tale and feel-good elements are framed naturalistically, making it charming on the one hand and genuinely moving on the other, and keeping it away from the cheesy; Even when it's predictable, it's not obvious.
Directed largely by Carlos Sedes, “Land of Women” remains remarkably focused, addressing its overlapping issues without dissipating its energy or, as is often the case with streaming series, wasting time on unprofitable tangents. And there is, of course, the raw tourist attraction. “Land of Women” belongs to a whole class of films and series in which city people go to the countryside, or to another country, to discover that they have been living badly, something that many, if not most of us, have ever suspected.
