“Spain does not need more brave people, it needs more female lawyers.” The phrase he says in the second chapter of The lawyers Javier Sauquillo (brother of Paca Sauquillo and one of the five murdered in the Atocha lawyers’ massacre in 1977) could serve as a summary of the series that La 1 premiered this Wednesday. The fiction makes a more than praiseworthy exercise of recognition of four women who, from their opposition to the dictatorship and the fight for workers’ rights, helped to open up possibilities and encouraged (and still encourage) not to cease in the pursuit of social justice. As they say, four heroines without a cape.
This creation by Patricia Ferreira is a clear example of the type of series that a public channel should bet on. The two episodes provided to the press show a solid production, with a good recreation of the period and a pertinent and discreet selection of archive images that transport the viewer to a Spain in which much was still to be built. It will have its shortcomings and, of course, it will not please some (nothing can please everyone), but both the intentions and the result are up to expectations.
The plot follows four young lawyers, Cristina Almeida, Manuela Carmena, Paca Sauquillo and Lola González, played with energy on screen by Elisabet Casanovas, Irene Escolar, Almudena Pascual and Paula Usero, respectively. Each episode begins in 1977, on the day of the massacre in which Lola González was seriously injured and Javier Sauquillo was killed, and then jumps back in time. The action really begins in 1964, when the four protagonists met as students. By the end of the first episode, the plot has already reached 1969, when Enrique Ruano, another law student and member of the Popular Liberation Front (played by Álvaro Rico), dies after falling from a seventh floor while being guarded by the Political-Social Brigade. This is also history: although according to the official version it was a suicide, the anti-Franco movement claimed it as a murder even then. Even without having seen the remaining four episodes, it is clear that the investigation into what happened will continue. The four-day state of emergency declared in Spain due to the protests sparked by her death is also mentioned in the series.
In these first stages, Lola González (played by Paula Usero), Ruano’s partner at the time, takes center stage. Meanwhile, Paquita commits to defending the residents of a Vallecas neighborhood against an unscrupulous real estate developer, Manuela begins to show her progressive and liberal vision under the orders of the pioneer María Luisa Suárez Roldán (another historical figure), and a determined and ironic Cristina leads a law firm that is revolutionizing its field.
Two things could be said about this good exercise in historical memory. On the one hand, the action feels like it is developing too quickly and only briefly skims over a few moments, possibly due to the aim of condensing the story into six one-hour episodes. For example, the speed at which it progresses means that the first episode goes from 1964 to 1969, without time for us to learn about the changes in the personal and professional situation of the protagonists.
Fictionalizing real characters is always complex, and even more so when the characters in question are still alive. Lola González passed away in 2015, but Sauquillo, Almeida and Carmena continue with a well-known public activity. A few days ago, Carmena and Sauquillo talked about the series on La SER. The first confessed not to have seen the series, she doesn’t want to, but the second has. In her opinion, it tells the facts well, but she thinks there are details that are poorly narrated. “It’s fiction even if it talks about us,” she recalled. Carmena expressed the complaint of some friends who had already seen the series: “They say that they have made me say some nonsense that I would never say. But everyone sees you as they see you, it’s fiction, I insist a lot on that (…). The important thing is the facts and the other is fiction.” Cristina Almeida, convalescing from an operation, sent a message to give her opinion: “This series makes us a bit like heroines, and we weren’t heroines, we were the conscience that we had to have in our time to make possible what was made impossible for us: freedom, democracy, the fight for equality.”
The reservations that real women have about the series’ portrayal of them are understandable. At least in these first stages, the viewer is left with the impression that Lola, Manuela, Cristina and Paquita are four well-off girls who can afford to fight for their ideals thanks to their privileged situation, characters who are somewhat unpleasant at first but have room to evolve and escape from that initial image. Sauquillo and Carmena do well to remember that these are fictional characters and to keep their distance from the production also out of respect for their creator, the scriptwriters and the actresses and so that they can do their job without constraints.
