• 'A Barbaric Life'. In the first person

The premiere of Una vida Bárbara, a documentary series about Bárbara Rey, has once again brought the immediately previous project of the same company (Atresmedia) to the forefront of the vedete. When we had conveniently forgotten Christ and King, they themselves remind us of everything that does not work in that fiction about Barbara King and Angel Christ. If the company prolongs this with a content only about Barbara ... Isn't he somehow admitting that the gap in interest between the two characters is abysmal? Of Christ and King only King is interested.

Its premiere, a few months ago, confirmed what we feared: the project seemed not to understand itself. And that weighed everything down. The pools about who would play Barbara Rey on the screen (note: nobody made pools about Angel Christ) missed the shot completely when it was revealed that the chosen to play the diva would be Belén Cuesta.

It's very difficult to recreate the wild glamour and runaway sexy of Barbara Rey when you lack that energy. That happens to Belén Cuesta and she can be grateful: at the time (the one that tells the series) for every job that that attractive animal gave to Bárbara Rey... five others fell off. To Bethlehem, on the other hand, her comic vis and her interpretive technique have given her many joys. But in Christ and King they fall short because Barbara King is... Else. Those responsible for the series should have taken it into account before hiring Belén who, on the other hand, gives in the series everything she has and more.

But it is not enough. Because what Barbara had and no other is what should go in a series that, already put, should have been titled simply Barbara. And is that Totana is woman, myth, concept, legend, right and wrong. Bárbara Rey works as a vehicle to tell many things about the recent history of Spain, things that have been told little and badly. Christ and King does not see that reality either, and it obviously escapes Him. The series is, above all things, a missed opportunity and a wasted bullet. Even worse: a blank bullet.

Barbara is a lot of Barbara. Too much, perhaps. A barbarian life admits it, plays it and takes advantage of it. Christ and King, relegating her to being only part of the series, sabotages herself in an inconceivable way. Belén Cuesta and Jaime Lorente do what they can (and it's a lot), but it's as if they are rowing against a narrative that, even if it is theirs, is not as interesting as the story of a woman who has lived so many lives that there is no series capable of containing them all.

However, that series can and should be tried. Few things better explain a country than its mocatrices, products of the fantasies, desires, complexes, frustrations and needs of an entire society. Barbara Rey, as maxim mocatriz, is more Spain than Spain itself. Approaching his biography is relatively easy; Distilling your concept is not so much. And recreating it is very difficult. Consciously or unconsciously, Christ and King does not even try.

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