"How much is art worth?" The voice-over question that opens the latest series of Prime Video has a catch. Almost as much as the series itself. One looks at a fiction entitled The artists: first strokes with a certain qualms. Art sounds like glamour, intellectuality, high culture, will I, spectator of sofa and blanket, be at the height of such a proposal? Sure enough, the title also had a catch. It's fair: nothing in this story is as it seems.
When María Dueñas was asked to write fiction directly for the screen, she was "very calm" with her usual novels. Exactly, those that sell many millions of copies and that have also become great audience successes once transferred to the screen. The plan, of course, had few cracks.
"It's been an adventure," he acknowledges via video call, "it's a very different process. Writing a novel is a much more introspective, more solitary job. You are with your ideas, you make yourself a fronton. Instead, this is a fundamentally team effort: the ideas and the initial development come from me, but then they mature with the scriptwriters. It has been a very enriching experience."
Dueñas had a certain advantage, despite leaving his usual playing field. Since The Time Between Seams, all his creations have in common a very visual way of narrating, they create an imaginary in the mind of the reader that passes almost naturally to the screen. "I don't do it consciously," she alleges, "I guess I have a certain audiovisual baggage from pure invasion of everything I see."
We said at the beginning that The artists: first strokes is a trap from its title. On paper, on the television, rather, it tells the story of two young people who by chance of life are forced to become traffickers of art forgeries. At its heart, however, the series is a bitter reflection on appearance disguised as a romantic comedy.
The origin of everything, form and background, is a wish, almost a tribute. "I really wanted to write something, I did not know in the form of a novel or in any other format, about the picaresque of the XXI century, a 3.0 version of Lazarillo de Tormes," acknowledges María Dueñas, "that so Spanish of deceiving with audacity, with talent, of crossing red lines but with such grace that it almost makes you less guilty."
And so Yago and Cata were born, first in the mind of the novelist, then in the skin of Maxi Iglesias and Ximena Romo. He is Spanish, heir to a family of antique dealers and about to lose his business; she is Mexican, an art expert looking for a new life in Madrid and with a precarious job as a waitress in a restaurant, of course, Mexican, in which they treat her with kicks, and with a family problem that needs a lot of money very urgently.
What conquered Maxi Iglesias about the script was, we had already warned, that it was not what it seemed: "I got a surprise, because I thought I was going to be the typical boy-meets-girl but as I progressed I realized that it was much more than that, "he says by Zoom from his mobile. He has taken refuge in the car after his sailing class, but even then he cannot escape the fan phenomenon. Three girls knock on the window: "Yes, I'm Maxi," he answers with a smile. Once the obligatory selfie is done, the interview continues.
Yago is the first protagonist that Iglesias plays in a series, the first character who bears, almost alone, the weight of the entire plot. A role like that had to be designated by fate: "One day I was looking for a movie to disconnect and I found The Secret of Thomas Crown. I hadn't seen her in years, but I like it so much that I know passages by heart," she recalls, "and I thought there's nothing right now that talks about art scammers. There he stayed. And a week later they call me and tell me about this project."
As in any story that emerged from the mind of María Dueñas, The Artists has a thriller background, with a plot of stolen Murillos that is insinuated almost from the beginning, but in that game of appearances at times the scammed is more protagonist than the scammer. The characters say that "there are people who cry out to be deceived". We transfer the question to the author. He doesn't hesitate for a second: "Yes, absolutely. I feel like deceiving four or five a day." Take it now. "The favorite victims of the characters are those people with little criteria and a lot of money, who most of the time have not earned honestly," he continues, "throughout the creative process we repeat a lot of: who steals from a thief ...".
In the profile of the scammed hides the vault key that moves the series. The first, not to go any further, are a footballer recently signed by Real Madrid who wants to become an art collector to look like Sergio Ramos, and his influencer girlfriend, who would give anything to approach, even minimally, "Rosalia or Kylie".
What vital teaching, legal or illegal, does María Dueñas take from her two crooks? "They have taught me that you have to survive against all odds, that you don't have to let yourself be crushed," she says, "I put myself in their place many times and I was convinced that if I had their talent, which I don't have, I would do exactly the same as them." Of that, of talent, or rather of all the forms it adopts, Puertollano also reflects: "There are times when we have to let ourselves be carried away by what life puts before us, to be less rigid in our way of focusing our qualities".
-Becoming showrunner, for example?
-For example...
-He will not abandon the novels.
-Far from it, I owe myself to my audience! But I'm not going to close this door either.
The future promises more fictions written by María Dueñas. Some, without a book in between.