The story is well known and has been the subject of sensational research (the “Crimes” monograph) or sensational exploitation for the past six years: Finding a burned body in a car in Foix swamp As suspected, it did not lead to a plan of reckoning between the gangs, but rather murder the possession of a man by his own partner and his lover. Both the dead and the damned police officers Barcelona that only adds layers of weirdness and admiration.
a discovery water seller The City Police in the fictional code was supposed to happen. And this is encouraged Barcelona production company Arcadia (e.g. ‘As bestas’, no less), which convinced Netflix to join the adventure and stream it. They handed over the creative reins from the platform to the screenwriters Laura Sarmiento and director Jorge Torregrossa, the artistic team behind ‘Intimacy,’ a careful series that tackles burning issues (violations of female privacy or toxic masculinity) with an almost unexpected subtlety of nuance. “It was kind of like a cue for Netflix to think about us after delivering something like this,” Torregrossa says. “It was like telling us that we can do whatever we want and that they have no preconceptions about where the story should go. We were free to take everything where we wanted and not get caught up in things that were attractive but not essential to us.“.
From the first episode, it’s clear, very clear what ‘The corpse is burning’ is. (Netflix, Friday, 8) it won’t. This won’t be another ‘who did it’ example, in part because “it’s a real case and with a little Google search you’ll already know everything,” says Sarmiento. Nor will it be anything tacky or overly witty, although the story pays off. Torregrossa says that what interested the couple we interviewed was to make a “psychological, subjective and emotional portrait”; “where you can get into the heads of the characters and always feel what they’re feeling”.
Genealogy of some actions
What or who seemed obvious, but the reason wasn’t so clear: “We wanted to explore why Rosa Peral and Albert López came to these conclusions, why they believed the chosen path was the only answer,” says Torregrossa. “After seeing reports or reading the news on the subject, what remains is a great mystery,” adds Sarmiento. The easiest thing would be to distance yourself from the characters, to classify theirs as unresolved insanity, but our thinking was to try to understand the genealogy of their actions. That was the real challenge and what we thought was most interesting for us as viewers and creators alike.“.
So do you think you are successful? For this historian at least, the fictional Peral and López, especially Peral, are somewhat incomprehensible characters; But after all, maybe we all are. “At least you understand how they came to the conclusion that there is no other way out,” Torregrossa says. “His is always a flight forward. Something very dark and terrible is inhaled in the final episode, the feeling that you made the wrong decision, but it’s useless to think of alternatives: you’re just doomed to it.”
Úrsula Corberó both meets and carries in her fictional Peral role. “He was a pretty obvious choice for everything: because of his Barcelona origin and his charisma,” says the director. “In the case of Quim Gutierrez [Albert López]We were considering him for the other characters, and it was Ursula who asked us to pick her as Albert. We finally offered it to him”. According to the screenwriter, Quim appreciates the choice in interviews, “perhaps because he knew he would rarely be the first choice in a show like this” “his physicality and humor were perfect for him.
Mediterranean Scandinavian ‘Noir’
If ‘corpse on fire’ were to be written in a general context, it would be: a dramatic ‘thriller’ but its writers dare to infiltrate this terrifying aura: Check out the nearly shot final shot of episode three ‘hereditary’. Terrorism is a matter of perception, and Torregrossa was exactly what he wanted to play with. “We thought a lot about a drama like ‘The Ladder’ [aquella multifacética exploración del llamado ‘crimen de la escalera’] because we were looking for that kind of psychological and highly subjective journey.” Sarmiento also emphasizes the impact of the unforgettable. ‘The murder of Gianni Versace’, “an interesting way of describing a murderer; you watch his processes with fear, but we can’t look away.” Also, the influence of Scandinavian crime mysteries was always in the air. For Sarmiento, he said in a message to his partner after watching the first episode that it was “Northern Mediterranean land”.
Well supported by the cinematographer Ricardo degracia (‘Red Rose’) and composer Aitor EtxebarriaTorregrossa (replaced Laura Manna in the middle) keeps the audience awake without the need for easy tricks or sensationalism. It relies on a fake static style to annoy. Small, almost invisible strategies, “perhaps a reverse shot, a dialogue between two characters is not academically shot”, but a low-angle shot in the middle, for example. Subtle ideas that “can’t be grasped directly by everyone, but always leave a mark on the atmosphere”. And they help the ‘corpse in flames’ go a significant residue, a feeling of restlessness and sadness that is hard to leave behind.