The Maite-Camino duo has become an international phenomenon and has made the series be famous in China
Marina Such, July 3, 2020
Ylenia Baglietto y Aria Bedmar son Maite y Camino.
A red bow. It is everything that the followers of Acacias 38 need to identify a very specific plot of this fifth season of the daily series of La 1: the love story between Maite and Camino. #Maitino, as fans know them, have brought to fiction the same phenomenon that “Amar es para siempre” lived last season with Luisita and Amelia, an international and passionate fandom that reaches even places that seemed as unlikely as China.
In fact, according to the data that TVE manages, in March, 30% of the tweets that spoke of the series came from Latin America and 25%, from the United States. And then there's Japan and China, but talking about that we have to go back to the beginning of a plot that started more as a joke, as a passing comment that Aria Bedmar, who plays Camino, made to the writers suggesting that her character was a lesbian.
"When I said that in a script meeting, also because in my personal life I am married to a woman and I fused my personal life a little with the character's past, I said that it would be curious that with that trauma that he has, and that rejection of men and that she is not able to share her life with a man (...), that there was a woman with whom she was capable, "explains the actress. Camino had arrived at Acacias 38 with her family escaping the trauma of a rape that led her to close in on herself and stop talking. She couldn't bear the touch of any man, and that, at a time when single women were frowned upon, was complicated. "It was one of those things that you say out loud and they answer you 'yes, yes, of course', but then you have it in front of you and you say 'oysters, this is serious.'"
Here Maite (Ylenia Baglietto), a painter who comes from Paris and who had previously had an affair with a woman, enters the scene. She does not want to go through everything she suffered then, but Camino is going to break her schemes. "We are happy because we have been lucky not only with the actresses who have starred in it, but also the whole environment has known how to carry it very well, has lived it with great intensity and has known how to transmit what we wanted to transmit," says Miquel Peidró, series script coordinator for Boomerang.
As in any self-respecting daily series, the story is forged little by little until it reaches the climax of his first kiss and, from there, #Maitino develops with the love and respect of all those involved, but, in Peidró's words, “bearing in mind that what has to prevail is that it is a history of feelings about all things. We have to respect the conventions of what we suppose, with the documentation we have, that it was the time with respect to that type of relationship as people saw it, but above all we wanted to make a very beautiful love story, regardless of that they were two people of the same sex ”.
"Despite being two women from the beginning of the 20th century, in love there are no differences between centuries, although it may seem so", Ylenia Baglietto adds: "Of course, there will be things that are very different, but when it comes to embracing a person, and to love a person, the measure is the same a hundred years ago as it is now ”.
However, the temporal distance between what is shown in the series and the time of the viewer can sometimes lead to displeasure at some turns. Some of these protests have come to Aria Bedmar: “Normally, (the fans) do take into account the type of series that it is, with what they already have that there are going to be those restrictions, those changes of thought … But yes, there have been times when they have said 'it does not seem right to me that they proclaim with the example of such' in the case of Felicia, Camino's mother, who is very much against that relationship. Let's see, the series is set in the year it is set, and if you want it to have a certain historical veracity, it has to stick to the thoughts of the time, no matter how unfair they may seem to us now (…) ”. "That means they care and that something has removed them, right? And that's what we do our job for," adds Ylenia Baglietto.
Even so, Peidró points out that they have softened and adapted some behaviors to bring them closer to the way of thinking of the 21st century: “The characters in this story who are, let's say negative, are not absolutely negative, because they should all be. There is a certain relaxation and even a certain understanding that would surely be foreign to the time, but which is convenient for us to be able to tell the story well. ”
En el centro, Felicia, la madre de Camino.
Now yes, let's talk about China. According to Baglietto, there is the first #Maitino fan club that she and Bedmar knew about, and that they found out is remarkable because, as the interpreter of Camino explains, it is not easy to know what is moving in that country: “Westerners use social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, things like this, but in China, normally, they don't use those social networks. All that #Maitino content that is shared on these networks, they do not have access to it, they are people who are very, very fans and get that material, and at home they spend their time subtitling it. They make some beautiful videos and montages. (…). From what they tell me, it is not something that is super national, but I suppose it is like here, people who belong to the LGTBI collective have it on the rise. And you don't see the full effect of that fandom in China because we don't share the same social networks. ”
The reasons why this couple has penetrated may be in that effort of all those involved by, as indicated by Miquel Peidró, being honest with the emotions of the characters and "in these things the truth that is given to the story helps, the truth that actresses give him, and above all that he does not want to be Manichean with feelings, but want to tell honest stories ”. They were all very aware of the majority audience that Acacias 38 watches, “because it is a period series and the audience it is aimed at has to have a lot of time to follow because it is a daily series and these people, normally, have a more closed mind than the one that can have a person from 40 years downwards ”, comments Aria Bedmar:“ So, it gave us a lot of modesty, a lot of vertigo, to deal with that plot, but from the beginning we wanted to give it something very subtle, very loving, nothing scandalous (… ). It is simply one more plot and that's it. ”
And, of course, it cannot be ignored that couples like #Maitino help the LGTBI collective to be represented, even though, as Baglietto points out, “apart from being a plot between two women, which is what at first attracts the public because, as we say, homosexual women need to feel identified and have someone to represent them, it is true that I think that both Aria and I have treated the characters with respect and we have not gone to play the stereotype. That I liked even more ”.
“I was surprised by how well it worked that Camino, a girl so shy at first, so withdrawn, that she was able to open her mind and fall in love with a woman. That character arc seemed wonderful to me because it seemed very difficult to make it natural and make it credible, ”in Bedmar's words..
This work of visibility and representation has become somewhat more common in the series in recent times. Without going any further, another Boomerang production, La otra mirada, included a romance between a painter and a married woman in Seville in 1920, and in the Acacias 38 competition in Antena 3, a spin-off has even been given to her female couple, #Luimelia. "It is something that I think we all need to see and normalize," says Baglietto, while her partner explains that, until now, she had not paid much attention to that aspect.
"Sometimes you have to go over certain things because, if not, they can hurt you a lot," he says. “I had never paid attention to the fact that there was not too much representation and now that I am precisely working in the sector of LGTBI representation in series, I realize the lack of representation that there was. I do not know if (it is) for the fact of working and informing me of other series, that if I were not working I would not see them and it would give me the feeling that they do not exist, but I do have that thought that it is being given more importance and that more visibility is being given ”.
Visibility comes, as the actress herself indicates, because "we are talking about them being protagonists, or co-protagonists, with the same importance and with a wonderful text and plot." LGTBI characters do not hide in the background, but rather take a step forward in the plots and, even so, there is still a long way to go, according to Miquel Peidró: “What happens is that they are always stories that, within the development of a soap opera, are limited to a certain number of chapters. I don't know of any soap opera in which the main story is a homosexual love story destined to last infinitely, but there is a tendency, I don't know why, to start and end within the context of the soap opera ”.
At the moment, in Acacias 38, Maite has returned to the Camino side after having been forced to leave. The red bow has not lost its symbolism.
Comments