Produced with Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (“Veneno,” “La Mesías”), now Cannes Festival main competition contenders as directors of “La Bola Negra,” Movistar Plus+ Original “I Always Sometimes” begins with love at first lust.
Laura (Ana Boga), a festival organizer in Berlin, and Rubén (David Menéndez), a bar owner, meet at music fest Sonar and now walk the night-time streets of Barcelona quoting Rilke. They attend a rave on Montjuich, chill out in a chic bar owned by a friend of Ruben’s, and have great sex, after which Rubén proposes she moves in.
Cut to Ep. 2. Laura got pregnant one week after meeting Rubén, has moved out – he proved a booze-addled wastrel – and is back with her suffocating parents.
Created by Marta Bassols and Marta Loza, all the remaining episodes are entitled by the place Laura squats with her infant child Mario as she desperately attempt find a flat of her own in Barcelona, a city awash with rich tourists and gentrification, and to earn enough money to bring Mario up, though she has to spend most of her time caring for him, which she loves.
“Rent here is bloody insane. It’s impossible to find anything,” Laura complains to an artist friend. “Nothing’s impossible,” he retorts. “Flats in Barcelona are,” Laura replies with vehemence.
A touching take on maternity grounded in the nightmarish economics of single motherhood and indeed current-day life, as well as the emotional chaos of an early thirty-something, “I Always Something” was released April 23 on Movistar Plus+ in Spain. It now makes its international debut at Canneseries in main international competition two days later.
Shot in six episodes, of 22-35 minutes, “I Always Sometimes” marks an auspicious writing debut from Bassols and Loza, and a case in point of the Javis’ nurturing new talent in Spain. Bassols, who played Roberta in “This Is Not Sweden,” was seen in “La Mesías”; Loza served as art director on TV series “Mariliendre,” also produced by Suma Content, the Javis production house. Directors are Claudia Costafreda, a writer on the Javis breakthrough “Veneno” before breaking out creating and directing “Cardo,” produced by Ambrossi and Calvo. Ginesta has directed episodes of Canneseries winner “Perfect Live” and Netflix smash hit “Elite.”
Variety chatted to Las Martas in the run-up to Canneseries.
Laura and Rubén share their love of Rainer Maria Rilke, quoting a passage in “Letters to a Young Poet” where he advises that “the point is, to live everything.” Laura, likewise, doesn’t want her existence to be defined by being a single mother….
Bassols: Laura likes sex, life, her work, art, eating, being with her woman friends. She likes the same she’d like if she wasn’t a mother. Maternity does’t eliminate what a person was before, nor occupy all their concerns. What Laura is doing is really important, but other things are really important to her. Her success is to see love and poetry all the time, despite her circumstances.
Most romances begin with normal life and build to a happy ending. “I Always Sometimes” is the other way round.
Bassols: Episode 1 is like what happens after the happy ending.
Loza: This is the story of a young woman who’s trying to find her way in life, and a million things happen to her. Episode 1 was originally Episode 4, a flashback. Editing, however, we realized we lacked context, which gave larger depth to the characters, and made the series much more original. You understand Laura more, where she comes from, her expectations, her origin, and so understand far more the rest of her journey.
Episodes vary in tone…
Loza: Every episode has a different color, set in a place that forms part of her life where Laura tries to find herself, from the position she’s now in. Each episode is like an isolated story, which can be watched independently, inspired a lot by the show stories of Raymond Carver. She lives in a different house and in a way is looking for part of herself in the places where she was happy before becoming a mother, but something’s changed.
And how did you share directing?
Loza: I directed the first episode, Claudia [Costafreda] directed the second, third and No. 6 and Ginesta [Guindal] 4 and 5.
And did you have any general guidelines, regarding direction?
Loza: Since my episode was the first, the first romantic moments, I was clear that it had to be the opposite of the rest: sequence shots, giving space for the actors, with a lot of rehearsals so that the actors could make the dialogs theirs, incorporating improvisation to break with the text, and give everything a before-dawn feel. Ginesta’s Episode 4, in contrast, where she Laura touches rock bottom, there are a lot of shots, editing, a sense of acceleration, and I think it works. Every episode had a different color, some warmer, some cold and Episode 6, set in Berlin, almost reaching black and white.
Most of the series, however, is set in Barcelona, which is crucial.
Borras: Yes, Barcelona comes across normally as a cool place, a vanguard city which everybody wants to visit. Our series catches the hostility of the city, its gentrification, “touristification,” and the problem with flat rent prices, which are next to impossible. Barcelona is a great place to raise a child if you have a lot of money. There’s the beach, parks, the climate. But we wanted “I Always Sometimes” to be full of nuance where the marvellous runs up against the hellish. And everybody in film can be good or bad at the same time and the series’ title also defines the city as well. It’s the ying and yang. Nobody is purely anything. Everybody is full of contradictions. What we like is to reflect and embrace them, those which can be worked on to become a better person…
The series is described as a realistic vision of motherhood. It returns time and again to economic factors, which you don’t see so much in titles with women protagonists…
Loza: The series talks about the difficulty of reconciling work and raising a child and enjoying that.
Borras: Neoliberalism is now so exacerbated that to live you have to put work at the center of your life when life should be at the center and work help you to be happier and live better.
Laura (Ana Boga) juggling work and motherhood in ‘I Always Sometimes’
