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“Zodiac” with sex clubs, but a case also seen from the POV of the perpetrator and a victim, “The Castle” “El Castillo”) a big hit at San Sebastián, marks the series creator debut of Isabel Peña, part with Rodrigo Sorogoyen
of one of the most exciting tandems not only in Spain, but Europe, behind “The Beloved,” “The Beasts” and “The New Years.”.
Here, she partners with Eduardo Villanueva, a co-scribe with Peña and Sorogoyen on “Riot Police.” “The Castle” indeed recalls the genre mash structure of the 2021 series: genre in an ongoing criminal investigation, a character odyssey and a drama-thriller set in a damning local context: Real estate speculation in “Riot Police,” the transformation of Spain’s sex trade into a sophisticated nationwide mafia in “The Castle.”
World premiering at late September’s San Sebastián Film Festival, “The Castle” stood out as one of its biggest hits: “The Spanish series of the year,” said El Mundo, one of Spain’s biggest newspapers: “Prostitution Spain: the assumed normality of rape culture.”
“The Castle” is inspired in part by “El Proxenata,” a novel by Mabel Lozano narrated in first person by a prostitution kingpin.
“The challenge was to make this narrative more accessible,” Peña said at a press conference at San Sebastián where “The Castle” proved the best received of Spanish titles.
So Villanueva and Peña opened the story up to other points of view. Set between 1999 and 2004/05,” The braids three storylines: a police inspector, Gerardo Liesa (Omar Ayuso, “Elite”) and colleague Carmen Osés (Laia Marull, “Take My Eyes”) who join Spain’s Ucrif, investigating the illegal immigration of Colombian sex workers. Their unit at first takes its task so non-seriously that in Ep. 1 it celebrates a fellow cop’s stag night at a brothel.
Colombia’s Valentina Vidal plays Claudia, a single mother so desperate for money to pay medical care for her gravely ill small son, that she volunteers to move to Spain to work as a prostitute. The series details her travails once there.
“El Suizo” meanwhile battles to transform isolated benighted roadside sex clubs into a dedicated macro-brothel network,
launching a marketing campaign, a board of management for the different club owners and a trade body lobby. He also hires a hot-shot lawyer who installs ATMs at every establishment, money laundering the brothel’s ill-gotten gains in the cash it dispenses to clients, with a 10% surcharge to boot.
The triple POV “allowed us to make ‘El Suizo’ a criminal, and via Claudia follow with sincerity the sufferings of [sexaul extorsion] and lend her character emotion. Liesa, for his part, when he begins doesn’t understand anything that’s going on, so represents the eyes of the spectators,” said Peña.
“The Castle” is not about sex workers, director Elena Martín (“Creatura”) said at the same press conference. “It turns on the mechanisms of human trafficking, how its criminal structure works, sustaining a business.”
That is caught is key scenes. Brought to Spain, the Colombian prostitutes are required to work off a debt run up by not only the airfare but much more. In one centerpiece, Claudia faces off with Manuel Muñoz, “El Suizo” (Raúl Arévalo in an imposing performance), her brothel club owner, for charging her not only for upkeep but extras such as lawyer’s fees. He ends up punching her in the face.
In another, a public prosecutor estimates that Claudia earned over €200,000 ($224,000) for “El Suizo.” Yet, after over two years working for him and 4,304 clients counted in Claudia’s notebook, by El Suizo’s calculation, she still owes him €300 ($336).
There are only two sex scenes in the series, Martín noted. Both are shot from the POV of Claudia. “We fled from sexualization,” said Martín. In both scenes, Claudia seem robotic. “In such a painful situation, a woman can just not be there mentally, disassociate herself,” Martín added.
A key still of the series, where the brothel workers are lined up in a row to be raffled to university students, catches Claudia lost in reverie, far away.
Tawdry, telling, shot in a grey sky Spain, “The Castle” simply tells it as it is.
“’The Castle’ will make a lot of noise and prove a conversation driver at San Sebastián,” predicted Juan Andrés Garcia Ropero, Movistar Plus Director of Contents. It looks set to continue to do so as the subject of a masterclass on Oct. 22 at Barcelona TV fest Serielizados, attended by Peña and Villanueva.
