Berta is a nursery school teacher and Jose Ramón is a security guard. They go through life without any fuss, without daring to face a family that disrespects them (they give them dry butter!), without funny anecdotes to tell, without knowing how to behave when they are in front of people who consider cool
Esperanza Pedreño and Raúl Cimas have a particular cadence when interpreting the characters, without raising their voices, without impetus, but with their humanity in each sequence of Poquita fe, the series that Movistar Plus premieres today. “And be careful what you say about them!”, warn the creators Pepón Montero and Juan Maidagán, “because the one who appears on the screen is yourself without going through Instagram”.
The first trailer that came out of the project hinted at a characteristic sense of humor, between costuming, pathos and absurdity, but the audience will find a short format where the rhythm of the comedy does not falter at any time while tackling situations of Berta and Jose Ramón’s day-to-day life: from the relationship with a poor man to whom he gives one euro every day, their plans for the holidays or her decision to change the way she dresses of the mother-in-law “It is a small series in every sense: small in format, small in terms of pretensions, small in terms of characters”, explain the authors, who had written the first season of Camera Café and who created Justo antes de Cristo .
“One can think that the characters are pathetic because they do not have great passions, because they are not heroes, but we have never written them looking at them with an air of superiority, rather we feel identified with them”, they argue. They are not without reason. As if they were surgeons of habits and customs, they extract from everyday life the details that allow anyone to see themselves reflected on the screen. The work is, in fact, a vindication of ordinary people. “Now everything that sells is glamorous, but we mediocre people have the right to be happy”, they defend, “because maybe we are happy and we don’t need anything else”. Why do you need to go to Thailand to justify existence when you can be happy if you stay at home on a Friday night in front of the TV?
The secret of Poquita fe is, moreover, in the short condition: “We set out to divide a year of the characters’ lives into 12 chapters of 15 minutes each.” Movistar didn’t believe them when they saw the scripts, they weren’t convinced that the texts could last a quarter of an hour: “It’s just that they’re like 22-minute episodes that you’ve taken the air out of”. And, with drops of fake documentaries and sketch series, they found a dense comedy rhythm, where there is no shortage of jokes in every minute of footage and where they get it right with a precision that surprises with its naturalness. “In comedy, less is more”, say Montero and Maidagán.
The audience will be able to see that they get away with it: Poquita fe is a brilliant comedy for those looking to get away from the noise and laugh from proximity and respect. After all, the viewer has much more in common with Berta, Jose Ramón and their acquaintances than with Carrie Bradshaw.
