SUMMARY

The Darién family, Justo and his children Rita, Vasco and Camila, live in the San Fernando town in Nueva España, near Veracruz. After waiting for four years for the return of Santiago Márquez, the town’s blacksmith, who had been arrested and had been serving in the galleys, Camila and Santiago will finally get married. But their celebration is interrupted by Mr. Jorge Mancera y Ruiz’s men, the tyrannical owner of the land, who decided to assert his ‘landlord right’.

Santiago is wounded when he tries to avoid that Camila be taken away, so she accepts to go with them to avoid that Santiago gets killed. In Mr. Jorge’s room, Camila realizes that this man is so drunk that he has fallen asleep without even touching her, so she manages to escape. When she gets to the town, she finds out that Santiago is quite serious, and besides she sees herself obliged to maintain that Mr. Jorge took her because he forces her to say it, not to see his manliness threatened.

Some days later, she’s kidnapped by some pirates. The captain of the pirate ship, a man known as El Antillano, feels attracted to her and for a moment he feels the impulse to protect and save her from her cruel fate, but he rejects the idea and the young lady is bought as a slave in the La Mariana island by Mr. Timoteo de Salamanca y Almonte, an old, bitter man who despises his family and has a maquiavelic plan to ruin them – to marry a slave and leave her all his money. Mr. Timoteo lives with his blind daughter, Lisabeta, and his sister Mrs. Francisca, a bitter and ambitious woman who only loves her nephew.

El Antillano is in fact Ricardo de Salamanca, nephew of Mr. Timoteo. He was accused of a murder he didn’t commit as a consequence of a conspiracy made by Mr. Timoteo and Mrs. Francisca, which he ignores; therefore, he had to leave and ended up becoming a privateer for the English crown at the service of another important privateer, John Foreman.
Some time later, Camila becomes a widow and the owner of a great fortune. She decides to go back to San Fernando and when she arrives she finds out that everybody thought her dead and that her sister Rita married Santiago. Later, she is visited by Ricardo, who she doesn’t know as Mr. Timoteo’s nephew but immediately recognizes him as El Antillano. Ricardo also recognizes Camila and he again feels that inexplicable impulse to protect her. Although Camila knows that Ricardo is looking forward to recovering his family’s fortune, she also feels an undeniable attraction, and some time later both have to accept that they have fallen in love. Ricardo is in San Fernando with a fake name, accompanying his cousin Lisabeta de Salamanca, who loves him since she was a child, and his aunt, to recover Mr. Timoteo’s fortune, claiming that his marriage with Camila had never been consummated. But Ricardo has another mission in fact – to find out who is mugging the silver convoys destined to Spain, with the purpose of ingratiating himself with the Spanish to get the King’s forgiveness for his piracy acts and be able to lead a normal life again.

The convoys, however, are being robbed by Mr. Jorge Mancera Mr. Alberto Lafont,, his right-hand man and other gentlemen from San Fernando, so that Ricardo will have to confront a very dangerous enemy.

When Camila returns to San Fernando, Mr. Jorge tries again to make her sleep with him, whether she wants it or not, pressuring everybody and taking away the granting of the mill and the warehouse from the Darién family, with which he almost ruins them.
When Ricardo and Camila fall in love, Mr. Jorge is not their only enemy, Lisabeta also conspires to damage Camila in whichever way and separate her from Ricardo. Santiago, on the other hand, since he is still in love with Camila, turns into Ricardo’s rival and fights for her using all the means available for him to recover her.

Summary partially taken from Esmas.

OUR COMMENT

From the many virtues of Carla Estrada as a telenovela producer, we would like to highlight three of them: That she is daring with original scripts and doesn’t limit to do versions or remakes; the total respect with which she treats the genre, keeping faithful to the scripts and melodrama rules without falling in histrionics and over-performances and above all, the way in which she makes the most of the actors’ capacity, giving them opportunities, in two senses – utilizing actors generally wasted in bad and mediocre roles and giving them the chance of interpreting different roles, leaving aside the molds in which many people put them.

This last virtue can be appreciated in “Amor Real”, where not only Fernando Colunga, but also Ernesto Laguardia interpreted completely different roles from the ones they had been interpreting up to then. And this also happened in “Alborada” with the roles of the actors Arturo Peniche and Luis Roberto Guzmán; and the same happened again in “Pasión”, where the magnificent Alberto Estrella is Mario, a horrifying and savage, though joker, pirate, loyal and faithful to the death, far from those sinister and wicked characters to which his strong physique condemns him.

But it’s not only that Carla Estrada and Mónica Miguel see their characters ‘inside’ unsuspicious actors, they also know how to make the most of the actors’ natural abilities in an extraordinary way. In this sense we want to highlight Sebastián Rulli’s performance in the role of Santiago Márquez, with which Rulli reveals himself as an absolutely expressive actor, moving away from those hero roles which don’t contribute anything. Rulli, as Santiago, transmits suffering, remorse, doubts, obstinacy and obfuscation, love, passion and desperation. Santiago loves Camila very much, he suffers a lot, and even though he’s the antagonist it’s a pity that he doesn’t keep the girl.

The fact that Carla’s telenovelas are always so well realized doesn’t have to make us forget how difficult and how much care this needs; that’s why we have to say that this telenovela was done with care, detail, precision, luxury and means, though some of the action scenes are a bit messy and dull - it’s obvious that they need more practice in that area. The action scenes go from having perfect shots to having some too static, and some shots are even bungled, in which the stage machinery can almost be seen. It seems they had many technical problems for the realization and, though not frequently, it’s noticeable. Anyway, the fact that they introduced the adventure stories element, which is totally innovating, is something to be thanked for.

The aesthetics of the telenovela, with a very good wardrobe and photography, reminds us of the American telenovelas’ façade, like the postures and angles on Valerie Sherwood’s and Kathleen Woodwiss’, something we saw for the first time in the final scene of “Corazón Salvaje”, with an aesthetic romanticism which is quite excessively overelaborated.

Maybe as the character of Camila is a country girl, though with some position, the language isn’t very prudish and demure and everybody speaks quite naturally, but without falling into vulgarity with sexual matters and natural and physiological needs.
Susana González gives Camila a freedom of movement and expressions which is not prudish at all, though demure, and her relation with Ricardo and the way in which she physically relates to him, touching and hugging him whenever she feels like, results fresh and expressive. In her conversations with Jimena, they both talk like true girls and laugh at the same things girls laugh at. The love scenes, at last, are more realistic and the kisses look like kisses, otherwise the title of the telenovela would have been a joke.

Juan Ferrara is terrific in the role of Mr. Jorge Mancera, a cynical villain, amoral and greedy; for him, the only law that exists is his own whim, but he’s nothing more than the representative of a corrupt and lazy social class, without being particularly evil, except in the sense that he loves no one but himself.

Mr. Jorge Mancera is a very funny baddy regarding his rejection for everything that makes him uncomfortable, and his scenes with his wife are hilarious – he doesn’t love her at all, still she amuses and respects him. Mr. Jorge is a baddy with grace.

Although “Pasión” is not a historic but a ‘period’ telenovela, in the sense that it only formally tries to adapt to History and tries to show women’s situation of absolute submission without having the slightest control over their own lives and destinies.
In the first part, Camila and Jimena are beaten in a quite realistic way (though then they didn’t have a scratch on the face) and nobody is shocked. The fact that both accept with resignation enough that they got rapped, or even that Ricardo feels pity for the two young girls’ predictable destiny because, after all, “women already know what they are there for” is an example of this. To make it evident that this situation wasn’t exclusive to the low class, the telenovela shows the characters of Ursula, Mr. Jorge’s daughter, forcedly married to an old man; or Mrs. Sofia herself, who feels impotent when trying to control her husband’s excesses; or Lisabeta and Mrs. Francisca, who must live under the protection of a man because they cannot even administer their own goods or because, owing to a simple whim, they’re left in poverty.

THE BEST

An example of what we previously talked about, about making the most of the actors, is Marisol del Olmo, an actress who had interpreted mediocre roles, at least in telenovelas. Marisol plays Jimena, Camila’s friend, a brave, dynamic, realistic and practical girl. Although in the telenovela it seems to be Camila the one who ‘saves’ her kidnap mates, in fact it is Jimena who managed to make them survive. It’s Jimena who advices and defends them and, literally, she takes the bread out of her mouth to give it to Angel and Claudio, insisting on their need to survive.
Jimena is loyal, faithful and honest; and though she’s seen the worst side of many people, she never stops being optimist – she’s perceptive and wise. She never gives up and when the moment comes to sacrifice herself for her friend she does it without getting into a flap but in the most natural and generous way. In this sense, Jimena is Camila’s best friend and not vice versa.

We love the scene in which Jimena laughs at Camila’s love dilemmas, and when Camila reproaches her for doing it, Jimena says she laughs out of envy, envy of the bad type.
Thanks María Zarattini for representing this type of friendship, frequent among women, in which envy is not an obstacle for love and loyalty.

There are other secondary characters that we also like, for example the character that the actor Marcelo Cordova interpreted, who we also liked as Marcos in “Alborada”, and when he played Ascanio, though it’s also the role of a quiet and good man; or the actress Anís, in the role of the scary and subjugator Manuela Lafont, or Kika Edgar as the innocent and passionate Inés. By the way, let’s see when Maite Embid is given a chance, because for some reason she always does the mean girl consumed by envy roles, but in the occasional scenes in which she smiles she shows a charming smile.

Although the song of the telenovela, sang by Sara Brightman, sounds corny to us, we love the one that is played when Camila and Santiago are together, interpreted by Denisse de Kalaff, and also the one that Kika Edgar sings.

THE WORST

There’s nothing particularly bad in “Pasión”, but after having seen “Amor Real” and “Alborada” it seems to be a little of ‘more of the same’; even the good things get you tired when they’re too many. Even the fact that Colunga, as well as Mariana Karr, builds his characters with certain ticks (like the ‘sure’ of Ricardo, the ‘yes, yes’ of Luis Enrique, the ‘good heavens, good heavens’ of Mrs. Isabel and the gesture of lifting up the shoulders of Mrs. Sofía) it gives us the feeling of something already seen.

Although the passing of time in telenovelas is something confusing, in this one the time Camila spends in La Mariana is excessively short and unconnected with the suffering she undergoes. It’s supposed that in a year’s time Camila is kidnapped, sold, married, and left widowed - how come that she’s desperately bored of being shut away? If in such a short time so many things happen, and besides Camila gets lessons of everything, how is it possible that she gets so utterly bored?

But it’s not only that, for Ricardo time and space also have different dimensions than for the rest of the mortals, because in that same year he goes pirating to the Caribbean and then he decides to go to Africa’s north coasts, from where he returns rich… Just travelling to the north of Africa took several months in those days! How did he have the time to do all that!? Not even if his ship La Salamandra were the Star Treck’s space shuttle! In San Fernando, time also runs very fast. In a year, Santiago was left paralyzed, then he’s in a wheelchair, then he walks and goes in search for Camila, to whom he supposedly looks for quite a lot (ten minutes?) and has everybody so afflicted with his grief that they convince him to marry Rita, who’s quite a witch. How much time did they think it would have been natural for him to suffer for Camila? A day and a half?

William Levy is a very limited actor, and his physique doesn’t make it up for those limitations.
Daniela Castro is a horrible actress, awful, an actress from the stock of the ‘out of breath’ actors that sound as if they’re going to suffocate. She’s too old for the role of Lisabeta and having that aphonic, hoarse voice she doesn’t fit at all for that role, because it’s supposed that Lisabeta is a witch inside but, on the outside, in the eyes of the world, she’s a girl that inspires tenderness, sadness and compassion; that is, her appearance and her behavior should be more angelic and should deceive people, but the question is that after ten seconds it’s obvious that this Lisabeta is wicked, with that hoarse voice and that bitter face. And if Ricardo doesn’t realize about it he’s a fool, because Mario does, not in ten but in one second and a half. And what do you think about this going to and fro of Lisabeta holding a doll as if she were a little girl? She looks like Chucky, the evil doll from “Child’s Play”.

The dances of the courtesans at Mr. Jorge’s and at his friends’ parties, as well as those seen in the streets, are horrible.