So ... I discovered I can order
à la carte on cable an
Argentine TV
channel,
Telefe Internacional. Although I'm fairly certain I watched some of its programming while I was in
Patagonia and
Buenos Aires last year, all this time I thought Telefe was a
religious channel--"fé" means "faith" in Spanish but in this case "fe"
is short for "federal".
So not a religious channel. Not in the least it would seem.
Two nights ago, I started watching the
telenovela Campanas en la noche (Bells in the night)--anything to avoid the 24-hour speculation-à-go-go on
MSNBC and
CNN regarding a certain report by a certain special counsel that finally has been sent to a certain attorney general who may or may not decide to disclose its contents.
Ay, por Dios. And you thought there were no ridiculous plot twists in real life.
The story so far goes like so: The lead female character,
Luciana (played by what I'm assuming is
Argentina's answer to The 'It' Girl,
Calu Rivero) is married to a
possessive, abusive husband
(Vito played by what I'm assuming is Argentina's answer to The 'It' Boy,
Esteban Lamothe) while secretly in love with
Luis (played by vintage
galán Federico Amador), a man in the
adult education
class she teaches who
she knew from years ago. Luis fled Patagonia with his daughter after
being falsely accused of murdering his first wife, and Luciana apparently witnessed his escape.
Luis has remade his life in the big city, but it's not without its complications. Por ejemplo, his current partner just murdered a neighbor, possibly a prostitute, and has disposed of her body ... somewhere.
Another character is from Brazil and practices an indigenous religion
in which she has horrific visions--such as one involving her own hand, her boyfriend's
mother, and a circular saw. (Trust me, you don't want to know.) I've yet to figure out how she fits into the overall story, but it's a bizarrely entertaining sideplot nonetheless.
It's Argentina, where psychotherapy is common, so the female lead and
her abusive husband are in couples therapy, and now the therapist has
asked to meet with Luciana separately to get to the truth about her
relationship with her husband and why she gave up her passion for
photography. (Hint: She is repressed by Vito and her disapproving family.)
I picked up all of this from watching two episodes and reading back
story on the web. Language-wise I'm getting maybe 25% (lots of rioplatense accents and grammar--ashá,
sho, cómo se shama, y ¿vos entendás? to sift through). As a result, I'm feeling pretty hopeless.
So, in short, María la del Barrio this ain't.
Nevertheless, I'm going to hang on. As my friend Faby would say, "You know how it's going to end!" Yes, indeed. But the journey is nonetheless entertaining and fascinating and the acting quite good. If you've watched Estocolmo on Netflix, you will be familiar with Esteban Lamothe's acting chops (and exceptional hunkiness), and I suspect you may see him and/or Calu Rivero (poorly used) on a North American screen one of these days, should they so desire to make the move upward.
I know people dismiss telenovelas as pop pablum, but this is a cut above the usual, far darker and moodier even when it hauls out a few clichés. In fact, with my ongoing savoring of Argentine culture (with a splash of Chile, Peru, and Colombia on the side), I'm starting to get a very different picture of the Spanish-speaking world, having been mostly exposed to all things tejano and mexicano.
I still adore Mexico, but Mexico is not all there is, nor is Spain. I wish someone had turned me on to the breadth and depth of Argentine and Latin American culture and society much earlier in life, but here we are, at 57 years old, an American living in Canada, partnered with an Egyptian, working with people from Australia, Britain, Turkey, India, Ukraine, and a host of other nations--and yet pining for another country, Argentina, a Spanish-speaking land that's kind of half-Italian (along with Jewish, German, and Eastern European) in disguise.
Che, esta es mi vida. Welcome to it.
