30 years of marriage and two children together. The image of the perfect family. Until she says enough. Until she finds enough courage to verbalize what she never dared and denounce her husband for continuous rape. The premise of To want, The miniseries that Alauda Ruiz de Azúa directed and wrote may seem far-fetched, but it’s a much more common phenomenon than it seems. These are stories silenced, kept under the rug. Few women manage to take this giant step that allows them to leave the marital home. The economic, family and social barriers are numerous. How to tell common friends or relatives that your husband has been raping you for so long?
All these fears are in this excellent work which, thanks to a very fine storyline, shows this economic dependence. These social prejudices against women, who feel alone when they decide to say it. To want It shows the moment of decision-making, but also the trial in which she, an impressive Nagore Aramburu, feels victimized again and subjected to sexist questions from the judges. Also how the two children cope with the news. Two different generations. Two masculinities. The one who perpetuates inherited machismo. Another who tries to escape, who lives her sexuality freely and who now puts consent at the center, as this series does.
let it exist To want shows the maturity of a country which has legislated on consent, and of a fiction which places it at the center of its stories. As Alauda Ruiz de Azúa thinks, the change experienced in these terms “is bigger than ourselves, bigger than fiction or cinema”. “It’s a social change, a change of concerns. I think that the fear of talking about the intimate and private nature of politics is disappearing. Before, in everything that concerned the theme of sexual consent, sexualities, there was always a precept not to approach these subjects because they belonged to a most irrational and wild area. And suddenly we see that they can be told from a political point of view and that they have a structural dimension, that they have a systematic dimension,” he explains.
He believes that “the current cases, which were very high-profile trials and which made us understand that these questions concern us”, have also contributed greatly to changing mentalities. “We ourselves sometimes had doubts about how to judge them. That’s what really interested me about the viewer’s journey, because I’ve been through that journey myself of saying okay, how can I judge this? I understand the situation, but how can I judge it in legal terms? And if I am already part of this family in a more emotional and social sense, how can I judge this person? », he adds.
For the screenplay – which she wrote with Eduard Sola and Júlia de Paz – they spoke with many women who experienced similar cases, which gave them “information, details and open fields, because an experience is not the same as seeing it from the bottom.” out.” “. “They helped me a lot to situate myself, to remove all the epic. They talked a lot about the social mask, for example. The fact that when he went out into the street he put on a mask, it makes you understand that often when victims have simulation or concealment behavior, they are accused of some type of evil or of hiding something, even though it is a survival mechanism,” he recalls.
A lot of times we wait until victims have some sort of epiphany and then report it. It’s a somewhat cinematic vision. What these women told us is that it is more diffuse
Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
— Director
The process also provoked many conversations between the women of the team and posed the eternal question that they had to try to answer on this occasion to construct their scenario: why didn’t she reported before? “We had to build that path, and that’s one of the things we learned from writing the show as well. A lot of times we wait until victims have some sort of epiphany and then report it. This is a somewhat cinematic take on the issue. What these women told us is that everything is more diffuse and more complex. Someone suddenly reaches out to you for some reason, a doctor sees something and sends you to a psychologist or social worker, in your life someone starts to see things… These are much more diffuse processes,” he analyzes.
For the episode dedicated to the trial, they went to see real trials for sexual violence. It caused them “a very violent feeling because you see a victim recounting something that was painful, humiliating or they are still almost trying to explain why it happened.” “In virtually every case I’ve seen, the defense strategy was to discredit her, to interrogate her. You understand that after these procedures, victims may feel all kinds of frustrations, fatigue and have little desire to continue appealing. We need to think about how we can proceed so that the victim does not feel unprotected or attacked,” says Ruiz de Azúa.
The series avoids any epicness and any Manichaeism, because they made it very clear that they did not want “a perfect victim”. “We wanted him to be able to engage in bad behavior that wasn’t understood. It was about going against the perfect victim. Somehow in life we are looking for the perfect victim, we need them, we want to support them, but the perfect victim does not exist. It is not obligatory. There is a perversion, it seems that if you have done certain things, you almost deserve what happened to you,” he says.
If the main character was fundamental, so were the men around him. From this husband played by Pedro Casablanc, who is never drawn as if he were a simple monster, to these two sons (Iván Pellicer and Miguel Bernardeau) of whom he offers different perspectives to new generations. Indeed, even if the series does not show any aggression or any sexual encounter between the parents, it opens its first episode with a sex scene between the youngest son and his partner, “a declaration of intentions”, as Alauda defines it. Ruiz de Azúa. to show that sex is also “people having a good time, treated with respect and empathy, creating something erotic and consensual”.
He also projects an optimistic look towards the future: “There is something very beautiful about the character of Iván Pellicer, it is that he is comfortable with his vulnerability and his sensitivity. Because I believe that new generations have a new way of seeing things that are happening in this sense. »
