SUMMARY

A terrible tragedy puts an end to a group of friends’ trip. Maria hears a shot, finds her friend Patricia dead and, in her despair, unwisely picks up the gun. Maria is blamed for the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Her husband, Esteban, an important businessman, doesn’t believe in her innocence; he divorces her when he returns to Mexico, buys the silence of those who went to the trip with them and tells his children that their mother died in an accident.

Twenty years later, Maria is released under parole for good behavior and returns to Mexico in search for revenge. She is determined to find the real murderer and to confront Esteban, whom she now hates for having left her to her fate. But what she wishes the most is to recover her children, Hector and Estrella. The first thing Maria does when she arrives is to call all the people who went on the trip for a meeting: Esteban; Servando, one of his associates; Demetrio, the company’s lawyer, with his wife Daniela; Bruno, the other associate, with his wife Fabiola and Esteban’s two aunts, Carmela and Alba. Everybody is surprised to see her coming in, and Maria sows doubt and fear when she informs them that, for twenty years, the real murderer has lived among them.

Maria re-marries Esteban to recover the love of her children, but it will not be easy for her since their children believe that she is a stepmother that came to usurp their dead mother’s place, whom they adore through a portrait with the picture of another woman. Maria will also have to deal with the aunts’ schemes, with Esteban’s associates and mainly with Fabiola, who has always been in love with Esteban and therefore hates Maria. Besides, Maria finds out that Esteban has a third son, Angel, and he refuses to tell her who his mother is. Angel is a sick and insecure young man, but Maria accepts him immediately and treats him with tenderness.

Little by little, Maria wins the love of her children without revealing the true bond that unites them. She helps Estrella to become mature and stop being a superficial and fickle girl and also to understand that, of her two suitors, Carlos and Greco, the one who truly loves her is Greco, a good and humble young man; while Carlos is only interested in her money.

Hector is an arrogant young man to whom Maria gives a great lesson when he meets Vivian, Maria’s former prison mate, and falls in love with her.

And, thanks to Maria’s support, Angel becomes optimistic and self-confident.

However, Maria’s biggest problem is Esteban. Maria finds herself in an evil crossroads, because she realizes that she still loves her husband and vice versa. But now her heart, hardened by twenty years of suffering, loneliness and abandonment, will have to search for the strength to choose between the path of justice and the path of forgiveness.

Synopsis from esmas.com

OUR COMMENT

This Televisa production was based on a Chilean original script of a telenovela with the same name. The story is attractive – a woman serves her sentence of twenty years and when she comes back, her children think their mother has died so they don’t recognize her and she re-enters into their lives by re-marring their father as if she were their stepmother. The original version, with a huge dramatic charge, was very successful in Chile.

The Mexican version, though, could be qualified as gloomy and mournful. The whole telenovela has a sad atmosphere, I mean not only the story but the whole atmosphere, the set, the wardrobe and the makeup. We don’t know whether this was the producers’ intention, but every time they showed the house where the family lived it reminded me of the house of the Monsters’ family.

This is a telenovela made in the year 2005, but it looks as if it was made ten years before that. The production is quite rancid and smells to mothballs.

The protagonist couple, played by Victoria Ruffo and César Evora don’t manage to give any freshness to the story; on the contrary, they charge it with more pessimism and sadness.

I agree with the idea that there has to be some telenovelas in which the protagonists don’t need to be young-looking, since there are many actors of more than forty years old that look good, but I think that in this case, it would have been better a couple with more chemistry than Ruffo and Evora.

Cesar Evora’s performance is one of the best things of the telenovela and his tone and style matches his character. However, I don’t think the same way of Victoria Ruffo’s performance - Maria keeps sobbing during the whole telenovela; she’s quite pathetic.

The rest of the actors’ performance is too theatrical, which makes the story go slow and bore the audience in some occasions. Actors’ performance doesn’t have to be like a Greek tragedy only because the story is a drama. Although the cast is formed by great actors from the Mexican “star system”, like Jacqueline Andere, Cesar Evora, Eduardo Capetillo or Sabine Moussier, here, they all seem to be poor quality and restrained.

It’s a pity that this production produced those results, because the script had possibilities. The whole plot of searching for clues in the letters that the dead woman leaves is interesting and keeps you on tenterhooks, since all the characters have a plausible reason for killing Patricia. It’s a quite clever point in the script that nothing is revealed until the end of the story, though everybody knows it. In fact, in the Mexican version, the murderer is a different character than in the original story.

Many times, we said that there aren’t good scripts and consequently there aren’t good telenovelas, but in this case, if we cut out some things as regards the production and the direction, the result would be quite mediocre.

THE BEST

The story in which the telenovela is based, and Cesar Evora’s performance, though he doesn’t fit as a hero.

THE WORST

The atmosphere, as we said, is very gloomy. The poor-quality performance of the actors, who speak as if they were a five-year-old reciting poetry.

Lupita (Maria Rios), who every time that she says she’s in love, she half-closes her eyes and puts her hands on her chest and sighs – I guess her performance is childish and mediocre.

The characters Fabiola (Sabine Moussier) and Bruno (Rene Casados) horribly perform their feeling of fear.