We review ‘Second season’, new series available on Filmin
Four years after arousing as much praise as rejection with that ode to provocation, neurosis and youthful frivolity called “Self-defense” (22), Berta Prieto reappears in the catalog of Filmin, once again allied with Miguel Ángel Blanca, to lead a fiction that could well be understood as the symbolic extension of her first foray into acting.
For many reasons, we read Paula Ferrara (Prieto), protagonist of this “Second season”almost like the grotesque and pretentious consequence of the ambitions of the previous character played by the aforementioned, whose professional success has finally led him to enjoy some triumphant and fleeting honeys and to end up admiring them from a long-ago distance. A broken writer, without voice or breath but with very high flights, who now decides to alleviate her low hours by accepting any literary retail from the highest bidder.
It is precisely the task of becoming the biographer of a fallen trap idol (Lil Rogelio, directed by a revealing Adán Domínguez) and the existential turn that this causes in his life, which makes this installment presented to us with greater packaging than its spiritual predecessor. It is appreciated, after all, that the thing has a better defined beginning and end, and that its respective inhabitants evolve beyond the image and the caricature. Between the most insufferable pijerío and a libretto on the permanent threshold of the parody of the Catalan bohemian town, we scratch a stimulating diagnosis on structural failure, second chances, the magnetism of masculine dysfunctionality, the fascination with disaster or #MeToo in music (so current, even at this point).
In Prieto’s mouth a reprehensible, capricious and disoriented archetype is revealed to us that will only find in the arrogance and overconfidence of the rag picker the necessary counterweight to his own insecurity and laziness. Getting involved in this project will turn his life upside down, and therefore, the plot as well; Because from the moment Ferrara plunges into this masochistic maelstrom and gets rid of his chronic medication, the story is infected with a growing disarray through increasingly dense and explicit scenes, more convoluted dialogues and completely feverish associations. A narrative match point, that of altering the logical and linear order of the montage, which gropes between formal genius and cumbersome gibberish.
Domínguez (Oktoba in the entourage), for his part, manages to make his story familiar to us without (almost) unequivocally referencing anyone, dragging us with him into a kind of metafiction that bravely dares to desacralize the irreverence of the urban scene and put in check its more sordid side. It is not so much what separates them, as its seven episodes little by little show us, designed to exorcise the midlife crisis and the consequences of a generation trapped by its own impostures and the fear of an ordinary life. Where derision ends and praise begins is something that, once again, only knows Berta Prieto.
