Left-handedness, as a concept, is synonymous with the opposite, with what remains on the other side. The devil is left-handed, and Tyler Durden teaches his hard-working Fight Club acolytes to deal with the wrong hand to challenge their perception of self. And hit in another way. without warning
It is not clear that Rafael Cobos had all this in mind when he decided to adapt the novel by Rosario (by force) Izquierdo El hijo zurdo (Movistar). He first took her to paper as it is her passion, her trade and even her hobby since in 2005 she wrote 7 vírgenes with Alberto Rodríguez. And then – it is not clear if by surprise, like Chuck Palahniuk’s characters who train with the other hand – he made the leap, the first, to directing.
We spoke to position ourselves as the person in charge of the scripts for films such as Group 7, The Minimum Island, The Man with a Thousand Faces and The Plague. We are talking about a screenwriter with two Goya awards.
«What decided me to direct was something as banal if you will as the proportion of the project. I feel like it’s manageable. Everything revolves around the interpretation, everything is on display. On the other hand, as it is proposed, it is a good proposal to take risks. What I wanted was to get away from what we could call the algorithm or the most hackneyed language of the generalist series. I preferred to go from braking to controlling more than necessary, ”says the recently graduated director.
In fact, the entire series, made up of six 30-minute episodes each, moves on the screen always at the edge of itself, in the exact place from which the abyss can be seen. If it were a fight, all the blows come from the left side, from where it seems impossible to predict a single movement.
To situate ourselves, the story of a mother and a son is told. The idea, explicit or not so explicit, is to reproduce the sharp and clean writing of the novel in which it is based. She (an electric María León and one step away from the seizure) was a young mother and is now the mother of a teenager out of her mind. He (an unprecedented and vibrant Hugo Welzel) simply allows himself to be led towards an inhospitable, aggressive and brutal terrain that has to do with the need (a left-handed determination) to stand against everything. And so until the young man ends badly; he ends up confused and unbridled into a gang of violent and xenophobic young people. And so until she allows herself to be drowned by a responsibility that can never be fully understood. What follows is the story of an impossible relationship and yet necessary. They hate each other so strongly and with such passion that perhaps it is the purest love.
«What interests me», says the director, «is tracing that contradiction that leads to doing evil when in truth only the opposite is intended. The best is sought for a child and that desire for overprotection leads to disaster. It is as if she condemned herself for having a child and, at the same time, she is aware that only her child can save her ». What is being resolved is what Cobos calls “the search for an identity space” (each one, mother and child, is what it is thanks to the other and precisely in spite of the other) that resists being defined when an explanation of the motifs of the series and that is perfectly clear in the most intimate mechanics of the images. The left-handed son moves across the screen like a wounded animal that violently demands and challenges the viewer. It is a series built from and for discomfort in search of that cathartic moment in which everything suffered makes sense, always behind that unexpected blow that heals at the right moment to knock out. Tyler Durden stuff.
Each half-hour episode works like an electric shock where the characters merge with the space they inhabit. The setting, as is customary to say, is one more character. And that set in which Lola and Lorenzo (that’s the characters’ names) move is none other than Seville, but a Seville that has nothing to do with the one seen from the windows of the Airbnb photos, but a Seville on fire, alive, dirty, resplendent, corrupted, pure, aggressive and infected with each of its contradictions. It is a holy and perfectly profane Seville.
“In Seville fervor rules”, says one of the characters and there he succeeds in finding the key. «The power of the brotherhoods and political power in Seville are closely linked. That is a fact. After the pandemic, for example, some politician had the idea of taking the Jesús del Gran Poder in procession through the most disadvantaged neighborhoods and it is not difficult to see in that fact, and it was seen, a political strategy. And that constant presence of religion is there in every image of El hijo zurdo with the virgins and the churches in every corner of the city right next to every step.
“It is important to understand this permanent contradiction between the divine and the human, the holy and the profane, to understand Seville,” Cobos insists. On the other hand, and now it’s time to play down the drama, “deep down,” he says, “we Sevillians are more playful and pagan than it might seem. That constant being offended by everything has a lot of theater, of posing », he says now, not so much about the series as about what he experienced on TV about a parody of the Virgin.
The one who speaks has spent a lifetime portraying the city in which he lives from all points of view. And always the most surprising. Always from the left, to continue with the metaphor. The Seville of Grupo 7 had to do with the trail of corruption and dirt left by the brightness of the Expo and the series La peste recovered for the screen the image of a great metropolis of the 16th century, the largest of its time, crossed and sick out of sheer greed. The key is always in the contradiction, in the paradox that leads to not distinguishing hate from love, in the astonishment of finding in the same place the certainty of condemnation and the possibility of salvation. The holy and the profane.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project