'Blackout', the series that brings together the best of Spanish cinema and that illuminates Alberto Rodríguez

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That a series that brings together the main firms of Spanish cinema boasts the forceful title of '

' is not clear if it is irony, diagnosis, prediction or perhaps a hasty sketch (or not so much) of the state of mind and even of the industry.

But there it is.

San Sebastián, as is already becoming a tradition, left its penultimate day in the hands of television.

gourmet menu for lovers of imminent catastrophes

emerged as a colossus lasting almost four hours .

That -- the scheduled description of the disaster that is coming to us -- is what each of the five episodes directed respectively and consecutively by

Its reference is neither science fiction nor the new horror cinema nor, hurrying, the newscast (which it could well be).

The starting point is, if you will, something much more palpable, close and, most obviously, sonorous.

The scriptwriter and originator of all this,

simply listened one fine day to the famous and successful podcast created by

in 2016 and that revolutionized the panorama of sound serials to the point of counting its audience by millions;

millions of terrified listeners, as well as not-so-distant relatives of those left breathless by

' sound adaptation of

The one who was the creator of the '

' series organized the agenda with

('

),

(

,

or

and

(

' or

, and with the obvious reference, if only to flee from it like the plague, from the French series by Jérémy Bernard, Guillaume Desjardins and Bastien Ughetto

' they got down to catastrophe.

The idea was to tell five stories from the characters, not from the more or less spectacular situation;

from hope rather than from simply ruin.

And so.

The overall result oscillates

, the first being the superb and icy 'western' that Alberto Rodríguez signs in the fourth chapter and the most spectacular moment, the episode inside the Arévalo hospital that makes the second.

In between, Isa Campos manages to compose the most original installment (the third) and it could be said that even free, which suddenly becomes a social and political commentary on the new

that of the PAUs and that of the swimming pools (necessary reference to the essential essay by Jorge Dioni López).

Sorogoyen complies with his ideology of adrenaline cinema with a slight gesture of routine in the presentation of everything, and Isaki Lacuesta closes the cycle with a new sample of that cinema so attached to intimate dramas and planetary catastrophes (a thread of hopeful pain unites what he does here with his latest and dazzling film, 'One year, one night').

, the general classification by points would be as follows: Rodríguez, Campos, Lacuesta, Sorogoyen and Arévalo.

Although it sounds more like a futsal team lineup.

Alberto Marini, Francisco Araújo, María Vázquez, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Ainhoa ​​Santamaria, Isaki Lacuesta, Melina Matthews, Isabel Peña, Patricia López Arnaiz, Zoe Arnao, Isa Campo, Alberto Rodriguez, Jesus Carroza and Luis Callejo at the presentation of 'Blackout'. ANDER GILLENEAAFP

Be that as it may, what makes the series really great is, from a general perspective, the brilliant basic approach that, suddenly, revitalizes and reinvigorates the forgotten, lifelong,

When so much is said about the blurred borders between the new television fiction and the cinema;

when even the popes of the cinema venture into the lucrative world of '

' with an almost suicidal liberality;

when festivals give up and fill their programs with the latest occurrences of the penultimate CEO of a parcel company, another that sells mobile phones or one whose best invention is an algorithm, when all this happens, we said, in the end it was as simple as putting two together words: cinema typical of cinema and episodes typical of TV.

We have arrived.

From a much more specific point of view, the find is a monumental Jesús Carroza.

Again:

.

He is one of those actors who gives meaning to each frame he plays and he is the leading goatherd in Rodríguez's 'western'.

In this episode -already at the height of the greats such as

by Mercero, or

by Chicho-, the director manages to reconvert the classic and slightly worn plots of the border, survival and even dueling at dawn on the stage of

'

' would not stop being one more series (correct and brilliant without a doubt, but one more) about a more or less desperate forecast if it did not have this flash of very long-suffering and hard-working genius.

Rodríguez, hand in hand with Carroza, are the ones who give birth to '

' (and we feel the occurrence).

Seeing hell up close has something of a cathartic.

Like religion itself, the vision of what awaits us if both Putin and all of us continue with our consumption habits places the believer (or the believing consumer) in the full acceptance of his defenselessness.

We are vulnerable both when we admit the unknowable secret of faith, both fascinating and terrifying, and when we abandon ourselves to the overwhelming certainty of the unknown, which really is not so unknown.

Religion, yes, comforts;

it is there for us to calm down.

'

', however,

It is so.

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