Anna Castillo and Álvaro Mel have the right chemistry in A Perfect Story, the third adaptation by the Valencian author Elísabet Benavent for Netflix after Valeria and We were songs. She is the vice president of a hotel empire that she will inherit as soon as her mother dies, an Ana Belén who evokes the essence of her mythical advertisement for the Community of Madrid, and who leaves her future husband planted in the altar. She feels oppressed by an environment where she is not in control of her life but, in reality, she doesn’t want to leave her boyfriend. So, when she meets David, a positive guy who has just been dumped by his shallow girlfriend for having no future plans of any kind beyond continuing to sleep on his best friends’ couch, they both decide to help each other change, improve as people and recover their former partners.
It cannot be said that, of course, this instantaneous complicity that they feel from the moment they meet will gradually be identified as something more than friendship. When glances are exchanged or impressions are exchanged, the series veers easily into the romantic comedy. The viewer feels the curiosity, the desire and the empathy of its characters, and wants them to stop their sterile flirtations and take action, undressing with a classic montage with background music, intertwining hands and white sheets, lots of white sheets. But is this enough? The simple answer is no, because she is based on nothing, on the accumulation of clichés at half speed, and she must thank Castillo, an actress who does not lose her interpretative character, not even in a bland work like this. .
A Perfect Tale, in fact, is almost insulting for exploiting the clichés of the genre and going nowhere with them. Here enters, for example, the treatment of secondary. Íngrid García Jonsson and Lourdes Hernández are Castillo’s two sisters, with a subplot that goes nowhere, neither comically, nor thematically, nor romantically. Elena Irureta and Ane Gabarain, who made a dramatic tandem in Patria, are reduced to extras in the flower shop where Mel’s character sometimes works, as if the viewer had to imagine the jokes and the kind of characters they are because we know the basics. of the genre and not because we can see something of that on the screen.
And, well, there are also the male lead’s roommates, who don’t even make sense. How can they have his friend, who has money to rent a room, on their couch when they even have a baby and clearly need the space? Why is this situation not clarified beyond the “if I have a rental agreement, then I will not be able to leave at any time” that Mel blurts out at a certain moment?
The slacker feel of the script, possibly aided by the literary reference material, offers a setting of characters drifting in and out having contributed absolutely nothing except a pediment that Castillo and Mel’s characters can talk to when they’re not together. In the field of comedy, the opportunities offered by the script are not taken advantage of, such as the potential entanglement of the characters in hotels, taking into account that she hides her status as a media heiress. And, for the record, at no time does it bother that it moves in a fantasy field where the characters do not have even a minimally realistic problem. But, even when proposing a fantasy, he deserves a minimum of coherence, to lay the foundations of that reality so that it is not (once again) something vaporous and only convenient.
A perfect story, by making so little effort to be solid, shows an absolute lack of respect for romantic comedy: it only gives ammunition to those who see the genre as minor, since not even those responsible for it look for a shred of originality, for building good jokes. , creating their own dynamics (because, I’m sorry, menstruation by itself, as the viewer can see, is not a personality). And, if we take into account that this production could perfectly well be a film after passing the scissors, there remains a long, redundant story, which lives on the narrative rents of the genre established by those previous works that did have something to say.
