Why Mexican dramas are hot right now
Pact of Silence, a racy soap opera on Netflix, joins the likes of Who Killed Sara, Money Heist and Narcos: Mexico.
Pact of Silence, in Spanish Pacto De Silencio, is the latest Mexican series to find instant popularity on Netflix. Latino and Hispanic viewers both in the US and beyond have become a key part of audience expansion plans for streaming platforms and the series joins the likes of Who Killed Sara, Money Heist and Narcos: Mexico. It is a compellingly over-the-top revenge tale in the style of the telenovela and is made with the same kind of high end cinematic style and convulsive narrative spinning.
Telenovelas are soaps with a Latin scent, charged with desire and tension, and trundled out over the past 40 years, originally as radionovelas. The more recent “new-wave” narratives have created a space in Latin America for critical/realist dramas punching away at issues such as police corruption, influence-peddling and urban violence.
Most, however, are still Cinderella stories, each featuring a female protagonist from a poor family who meets and falls in love with a wealthy man, the abiding themes including murder, incest and adultery.
And Pact of Silence doesn’t shy away from the soap-opera style narrative and dysfunctional family dynamics typical of traditional telenovela series, while also adding elements of the fast moving mystery story and the crime thriller.
Directed by Carlos Villegas Rosales (La Reina del Sur, another great Mexican series) and written by José Vicente Spataro (Relaciones Peligrosas, also Netflix telenovela), the new 18-part series stars a formidable group of glamorous and fabulous Mexican actresses including Camila Valero, Adriana Louvier, Marimar Vega, and actor-singer Litzy.
What they give us is a look inside contemporary Mexican society with an intriguing melodramatic plot full of suspense and surprise bringing a group of characters through a series of trials and tribulations to their appropriate rewards. As it begins, it appears to be a story about the triumph of virtue and the punishment of vice, with the sympathetic and virtuous rewarded. Where it leads is anyone’s guess given the propulsion of Spataro’s storytelling.
Plausibility is not exactly a required dramatic ingredient in this kind of narrative. No conception of a required moral order is in evidence and ambiguities of latent motives quickly assert themselves. It’s twisty, convoluted and racy.
The first episode instantly drags us in. Rosales is a kind of immersive action film engineer and his camera is rarely still. He immediately introduces us to the genre’s almost theatrical conventions with a breezy almost three-dimensional cinematic flair.
A phone starts ringing. A teenager answers it, somewhat alarmed. “Leave now! You’ve been found!” Four panicked girls, one carrying a baby, start running run through a courtyard and into a field. Somehow that baby ends up abandoned in what appears to be a deserted house. The girls crowd into a van driven by a woman who yells, “Isn’t this what you wanted?” as they all sob.
This was sometime in the past and the woman, played imperiously by Chantal Andere, turns out to be the headmistress of the private school the girls, one of them pregnant but protected by her friends, attended. The teacher is now a philanthropist helping girls and young women. The stage is set.
We then find Brenda Rey (the chameleonic Camila Valero), a highly successful influencer with more than 10 million followers, famous for her skincare routines and a sponsor of needy kids. She is the baby who was abandoned and appears to have tracked down the private school class the girls attended. One of them is her mother. She is determined to take out vengeance for the desolate life she led after being dumped and brought up by a poor woman who lived near the house where she was left.
It’s pretty implausible but the story has such a hurried momentum there’s little time to stop and think it through; Spataro races events along too fast for contemplation. (The genre is sometimes called “culebrón”, which comes from “Culebra”, a type of mythical, supernatural snake, alluding to the length of the plots and intense ups and downs, akin to a snake’s serpent-like movement.)
Rey plans to infiltrate the lives of these women without them knowing who she is, “and then I’ll hit each of them where it hurts the most”.
A flashback tells the backstory of how the teenage girls had banded together at the school, each binding their belly so as not to show the pregnancy.
As Rey tracks down the women we quickly find that everybody is harbouring so many secrets you’re never quite sure which ones are big enough to die, or kill, for.
What’s interesting already in the first episode is how the writers play with the balance between the campier, soapier, comedic aspects and the dramatic parts of the show and already are mining the almost magic realist-style mystery.
Spataro seems to be using the conventions of serial melodrama – chance encounters, thoughtless decisions, overheard conversations, accidental occurrences, malevolent intrigue, and emotional opportunism – to connect to some deeper, obscure pattern of significance, some hidden moral order.
It’s turning into the sort of show where you find yourself thinking after some improbable, deeply weird event, “Why is this happening?” or “When will they pay this off?” The way Spataro and his director etherealise the narrative invites us to supply a moral to each twist and turn.
True stories of human cruelty not only engage but fascinate even more when they become cold cases, sometimes taking on the lineaments of fairy stories.
In the case of British TV presenter Jill Dando, the narrative features a beautiful innocent victim, maybe the wrong person in the wrong place, an unknown violent predator, a killing that smacks of an execution, and a long-form piece of storytelling that lends itself to narratives of investigation. And the creation of many urban myths, told and retold with differing details.
As the soberly and thoughtfully made Netflix series Who Killed Jill Dando? shows, the still unsolved murder in 1999 of the journalist and newsreader, known as “the golden girl of British TV” and bearing a striking resemblance to Princess Diana, is one of the UK’s great mysteries and the human cost has not been forgotten. It was a killing that still makes no sense; it was so outrageously flagrant, the shock of the deed still capable of creating a rift between order and chaos.
Seemingly unmotivated, strangely daring, almost imprudent in its daylight execution, it took place in a country where this kind of monstrous thing only seems to happen in crime novels. Dando was shot at her front door in Fulham, west London; her murderer sprung on her from behind and fired a single bullet into her temple. Her neighbour discovered her body about 15 minutes later and called the police. Dando was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.
The three-part series is directed by Marcus Plowright (Fred and Rose West: Reopened) and executive produced by Emma Cooper (The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unseen Tapes) for her new production company Empress Films. Her slant in the burgeoning true crime factual space is to look at investigations where the public think they know the story but under forensic light the story may be quite different.
“With these high-profile cases, there is a huge amount of information coming in from everybody across England, which makes it very, very difficult to sift through what is a credible lead and what isn’t,” Cooper says. “And the intersection with the tabloids and the police is very complex. I think that the tabloids did their job by keeping the case in the public consciousness, and I think the police were trying to do their best, but there was an enormous amount of information coming in. The police had an almost impossible task.”
Across three episodes Cooper and Plowright trace Dando’s movements leading to that morning, interviewing many closest to her, including her colleagues, her brother Nigel, and her fiance at the time of her death.
Then there’s the police investigation itself led by the rather dour Detective Chief Inspector Hamish Campbell and the process of speaking with more than 4000 people and examining hundreds of hours of CCTV footage. Was it the work of a Serbian hitman, the single shot to the head and the clean getaway in broad daylight suggesting a professional killer? This was a theory that obsessed London’s tabloids.
Or was it a random killing, an obsessed stalker, a jilted lover or someone named on Crimewatch, the factual TV show she also presented, after revenge? And who was the suspicious looking “Sweating” man at a nearby bus stop and why was a blue Range Rover lurking around the broadcaster’s street and then fleeing at high speed?
It’s a well-made piece of TV true crime, sympathetic and compassionate in the way it presents Dando as a human being and not simply a victim. Cooper and Plowright with some diligence avoid the problems inherent in what’s now called Netflix’s “true crime industrial complex” in which murder is turned into mass entertainment.
As Cooper says, it was “the perfect mystery from start to finish.”
Pact of Silence and Who Killed Jill Dando? are streaming on Netflix.
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