The label, the brand or, where appropriate, the stigma, are, among other things, the ways in which privilege condescendingly points out those who are different or those it considers inferior. He is marked not only to indicate his strangeness, but to immobilize him, to prevent him from being anything more than that. He is accepted, even applauded, but making it clear that he is condemned to be what the owner of the words wants him to be. In reality, there is a non-casual parallelism between the content of the work of Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo since they put on ‘The Call’ (the musical first and the movie later) and their public image.
Since they were identified as new, as different, they were marked with the nickname ‘the javis’ to perhaps make it clear that their success necessarily had an expiration date, that they were a thing of youth fashion, that their virtue was nothing more than a fungible asset associated to their supposed idiosyncrasy of friendly and very gay gays millennials. Meanwhile, they rehearsed stories of characters harassed, ridiculed, subjected to public ridicule and, for all this, marked. So much ‘Paquita Salas’ as ‘The Poison‘They had something of that, of humanist protest against stigma, of vindication of the offended.
On Friday, the cinephile altar of a film festival (and not just any, but the largest of them all in Spain) reserved them a privileged place in the official out-of-competition section. It was expected with anticipation ‘The Messiah’, This is the name of the seven-part series produced by Movistar, and an extravagance from both the programmer and the authors themselves, by definition (and by label), extravagant was expected. Well, the intended extravagance turned out to be exactly that: a colossal, by size, by intention and by form, eccentricity in its most genuine sense: very far from the center, far from the lukewarm.
‘The Messiah’ stands on the screen as a mega-production lasting nearly eight hours that discusses each of the commonplaces assigned to both television series in general and the stigma that Ambrossi and Calvo carry in particular. It is a work by genuine authors capable of recomposing from their radicality the pieces of subjects as diverse as classic melodrama, horror, fantasy, ‘kitsch‘more acidic, aesthetics’youtuber‘and immediacy’TikTok‘. The result is a disconcerting production that vibrates as much in each of its successes as it feeds on its errors; an omnibus production (everything fits and everything shines) that so clearly identifies the voice of its creators that it could be said to be the best antidote against, in fact, any stigma.
The story of a liberation is told. But also from a family. One day a man discovers a viral video, grim and hypnotic to the point of fainting, of a Christian pop music group. Pay attention to the compositions (Hidrogenesse stuff) and the visual pastiche. From there, the character of Roger Casamajor He will begin a journey to the depths of his own family and his most intimate anguish. Those who sing are her sisters. What follows is the story of a mother (whom she gives life by order Ana Rujas, Lola Dueñas and Carmen Machi), a father (Albert Plan), some daughters (one of them a very solvent Amaia Romero) and two more brothers (Macarena García and the aforementioned Casamajor) locked up, all together or separately, in an obsession. Those who sing want to redeem the world with their music and the others only aspire to save themselves in any way. It is a story of religious fanaticism and aliens; of spirituality and despair; so exaggeratedly comical that one would say infinitely sad.