‘Aída and return’: Paco León and Carmen Machi return with grace and emotion to their origins to test the limits of humor | Cinema: premieres and reviews

Same as Frasier was born in 1995 from a rib Cheers, Aida He did it in the decade after the popular 7 lives. In 2005, a few months after the last episode of the final season of the great American series starring two psychiatrist brothers, the term spin off crossed the Atlantic hand in hand with a character as unique as it was unexpected: a poor Spanish cleaning woman who survived with two of her children, her ex-vedette mother and her ex-junkie brother in a popular Madrid neighborhood called Esperanza Sur. Aída García was Carmen Machi and the ex-junkie, Luisma, was Paco León. What happened next is the history of Spanish television and comedy.

There and backthe new feature film directed by Paco León, works not only as a tribute to a program for many (including myself) unforgettable, but as an autofiction full of self-confidence about political incorrectness and the limits of humor; the weight of television and individual fame in a family of popular success; AI; MeToo and cancellation, and the parallel reality of social networks.

Paco León places the end of the series in 2018, four years after the actual closure, to imagine a goodbye in which Aída’s jokes no longer have a place and its main actress has reached the personal and professional limit with the series. In this metafiction game it is told how the character of Aída is a burden for Machi; the tensions between the actors, the scriptwriters and the network; the betrayals and circles behind the scenes and even the activism queer by Eduardo Casanova. All to offer a satirical overview of the guts of a sitcom whose irreverent humor condemns it to extinction.

A decade after its luminous Kiki, love is made —in which León demonstrated his talent for choral (and erotic) comedy—, the actor and director who debuted with the costumbrista experiment of Carmina or burst and of Carmina and Amenor who dared to revise the myth of The Wizard of Oz con Rainbow and Ava Gardner’s with the series Madrid burnsonce again demonstrates that his curious instinct behind the camera and his infallible comic vision in front of it go a long way.

In his last real season, Aida He began to suffer the first consequences of a society that no longer tolerated certain jokes in the same way. The series laughed at everything, at the immigrants, like the good guy from Machupichu, at the brainless drug addicts like Luisma and Baraja, at the stale, xenophobic, homophobic and whoremonger Mauricio Colmenero, at the progressive good nature of Chema, at the homosexual boy Fidel, at the sexual promiscuity of Macu, at Eugenia’s showbiz dreams, at Soraya’s Disney naivety… Aida He stepped in all the puddles of a stupid, neighborhood Spain that Paco León recovers in the film that is now being released to settle accounts with his origins.

In that sense, There and back It has some cathartic nostalgia embodied in that immense and unusual actress that is Carmen Machi. From his inimitable hand, There and back look in the rearview mirror without shame. Not to go back, but to remember that something important emerged from that incorrect and rude humor that is perhaps worth remembering, even if it is to bury it with dignity.