04/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Sara Cano and Paula Fabra present a stunning and moving series about relationships and their setbacks

There is always a moment when a couple's life becomes a struggle. Many films,  with varying degrees of success, try to reproduce when everything goes hopelessly wrong. But it is hard to evoke the time when that couple loved each other.

This is precisely one of the greatest achievements of The New Years, the series created and written by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Paula Fabra and Sara Cano (the script also involves Antonio Rojano and Marina Rodríguez Colás), directed by Sorogoyen himself together with Sandra Romero (Por donde pasa el silencio) and David Martín de los Santos (That Was Life [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Damián París and Rosa Garcí…
interview: David Martín de los Santos
film profile]), and which is presented out of competition at the Venice International Film Festival. Starring Iria del Río and Francesco Carril, the series tells the story of the life of a couple, Ana and Óscar. In ten episodes, from the end of 2015 to the present day, each episode shows New Year's Eve and New Year’s Day. She has her birthday on the first day of the year and he has his on the last. On the night they both turn thirty, they meet, fall in love and begin a relationship whose comings and goings will last a whole decade.

Through these endings and beginnings of the year, the series discusses everything that makes up a couple, what happens in that relationship over time, from falling in love to everyday life with each other, the memories that narrate it, its good and bad and the contradictory feelings between two people who once loved each other. It is also about everything around the couple: family, friends, work, expectations, all those key circumstances that can make a relationship better or worse or both at the same time.

The idea of telling the story of this relationship through these important dates was a risk, as well as interesting, but the creators manage to pull it off in a surprising and at times overwhelming way. It dazzles with its ability to explore how this couple evolves, their encounters and misunderstandings, through those nights and days that herald the end of something and the beginning of something else that could be different. The series has a melancholic point of looking back and wondering what happens between all those years between the end of youth, when there is still almost all the way to go, to the beginning of maturity, how we become the people we are, whether the life we have is the life we want.

Also surprising is the vividness with which all this complexity is narrated. The characters are portrayed with humanity and realism, that the protagonists manage to convey with just a look, an expression or a gesture. And the out-of-field: the narrators achieve the great virtue of telling what cannot be seen but is there (the soundtrack also aids in this), how a relationship is twisted without explicitly seeking or showing why, how there are absences that can occupy more than any presence.

The New Years is a series that leaves a lasting impression. A series capable of being profound and moving from the simplicity of the everyday, of achieving a real dissection of a couple, love and its setbacks. Undoubtedly one of the greatest series in recent years.

The New Years is a production from Caballo Films, Movistar Plus+, Las Rapadas and ARTE France, which will be distributed internationally by Movistar Plus+.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)