When on February 23, 1981, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero entered the Congress of Deputies and opened fire, the boy Álvaro Morte was celebrating his sixth birthday. This has soured the family celebration, like that of much of the country, plunging homes into another lockdown, holding their breath and no one thinking of going out before having clarified the situation.
“DESCEND!” – exclaimed the leader of the coup plotters – one of them, and there were several -, with his tricorn hat perfectly balanced on our shame and his lack of sense of the ridiculous. Immediately afterwards machine gun fire rained down. Everyone paid attention to him. Minus three daredevils full of reasons not to give up: Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the PCE, General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, then vice president of the Government, and Adolfo Suárez, the president who resigned but was present in his place. He didn’t jump, he said years later, because he didn’t feel like it.
Maybe then the little girl Death hadn’t realized the gravity of the situation. But 44 years later, when that episode is already a determining part of the history of Spain, it is presented for the first time Anatomy of a moment. In the series based on Javier Cercas’ masterpiece, produced by Movistar Plus + (which will premiere it on Thursday 20 November) and created, written and directed by Alberto Rodríguez, the actor plays Adolfo Suárez. “Until I started preparing for the role, I wasn’t aware of the stakes or the difficulties it would entail,” Morte tells this newspaper.
Suárez is one of the three heroes of betrayal on which the book is based. Three figures who commit the blessed disloyalty of not following the principles of their respective groups in favor of a greater good: saving democracy.
Gutiérrez Mellado, played by Manolo Solo, went from encouraging the ’36 coup as a soldier to trying to democratize the army during the Transition. Carrillo understood that the communists’ dilemma then was not reduced to defending the republican flag or not accepting the monarchy, but rather it was between the end of the dictatorship and the consolidation of democracy. For this reason it was necessary to renounce symbols that even today many of his people do not forgive him for. And Suárez… “He was the biggest traitor of the three,” says Cercas in a conversation with EL PAÍS, one Monday morning in November, together with Rodríguez, “because he facilitated all possible disloyalties on all fronts for democracy.”
Unleashed imagination
Heroes misunderstood and without reward beyond contempt. A talkative and unpredictable king determined to get rid of Suárez by almost any means, but that day he stood still in his surroundings with Sabino Fernández Campos at the head of the Royal House. In the end, he got it right. Conspiratorial politicians, journalists dedicated to hoaxes, angry soldiers, bloodthirsty terrorists…
It is an unbridled imagination that has given rise to a collective fiction, says Cercas, not always in line with reality. Epic, tragedy, risk of tyranny, a country that wanted to awaken to democracy. Anatomy of a moment It has everything. It’s a great story in itself. “The protagonists are complex characters who are also full of emotions,” says Alberto Rodríguez.
It’s hard to fail when you translate an epic of that size into images. But the Sevillian filmmaker turned it into one of the best series shot in Spain. This is what I had doubts about. “I wasn’t interested a priori,” he admits. But when the producers José María Lorenzo and Domingo Corral, former content director of Movistar Plus +, responsible for most of the best performing audiovisual projects of the last two decades and with whom Rodríguez made The plague and many of his films – given his reservations, asked only one thing of him: “That he read the book,” says the director. Two days later he accepted. “As soon as I started, patterns and images started forming in my head,” he recalls. He no longer hesitated and began working on screenplays with Rafael Cobos and Fran Araújo.
It was time to get to the essence of a work that contains almost everything about the contemporary history of Spain. To the action of the coup and the core of its characters. According to Rodríguez, what Cercas achieves Anatomy of a moment It is reworking what is known. Building another fiction, much more understandable, based on rigor and far from conspiracy theories.
In his time, the author faced all risks and numerous attacks. Above all for the raw and empathetic treatment he reserves for the characters, but also for the analysis he makes of the role of King Juan Carlos. The season has been open for a few years now. But in 2009, when the book was published, the monarch still enjoyed the pact of media silence, which disappeared years later. “Now it’s easy, we’ve gone from flattery to derision with no middle ground. But the truth is that back then telling certain things was much more complicated.”
Earthquakes
Like, for example, the book that appears with the support of a cover of The weekly country in which the following sentence was read: “It is true that the King stopped the coup. But it is equally true that his indiscretions and his desire to put an end to Suárez facilitated it”, headlines the publication. This produced an earthquake. But Cercas had more than equalized him after four years of investigations. Today he repeats it again: “We have a legitimate way to remove rulers from power, which is elections, constitutional means. And there are others, illegitimate ones. There, some limits were crossed that should not have been crossed. And Juan Carlos did things that he should not have done.”
It is intended to encourage in various political and military circles the desire to put an end to Suárez. This made several commanders believe that he would support a coup. Starting with Alfonso Armada, who had been his mentor and had led a conspiracy that also involved political forces that would have supported a concentration government presided over by him.
The trial proved the facts and convictions were pronounced. Everything has been known for years, yet the conspiracy theories continue: “I ask Congress to declassify all documents,” the writer asks today. “In this way it will be seen that there is nothing more relevant to say.” With what is known, even younger generations will be able to understand what happened. How much did it cost? “This is the story of our conquest of democracy,” says Cercas. “Many said its consolidation was inevitable. And a ham!”
For this they made use of the full involvement of an extraordinary cast. Although Rodríguez was confident in the choice of Eduard Fernández to play Carrillo and Manolo Solo for Gutiérrez Mellado, he was dubious about Morte. Eva Leira and Yolanda Serrano, in charge of choosing the actors, convinced him of something that also turned the head of the person in charge of playing the then president. A feeling shared by the director but soon passed: “For me the result was something unexpected. I immediately understood, while rehearsing, that his elegance, that energy he has now and his ability to convince in everything contributed a lot to the spirit of the character”. A masterful make-up by Yolanda Piña and Nacho Díaz did the rest for him and all the other artists.
Even a few days of intense filming at the Congress of Deputies, that place in front of which they pose on a November morning, have already returned to their being. They succeeded on the condition that if an extraordinary plenary session was called – and given the current political situation, this could happen at any moment – they would have to dismantle everything in three hours.
This is not the first time Eduard Fernández has worked with Rodríguez. She acted with him Paesa, the man of a thousand faces and for this adaptation he said to him: “I am delighted to help you tell this story.” What he liked most about stepping into Carrillo’s shoes was claiming him as the key to the arrival of democracy: “Giving him that central place and valorizing his risk and the decision to sacrifice himself, I don’t know if consciously, to make it happen.”
Manuel Solo found it particularly moving to underline the loyalty that, beyond the price to be paid, Gutiérrez Mellado showed towards Suárez until the end. “On his father’s side, he did his best to take care of him and at the same time, as a soldier, he followed all his orders.” Death was aware of the risk he was taking. The effort to get the role of Suárez could be a poisonous gift for the protagonist The robbery of the money. An opportunity or a brown opportunity? Seeing the result, his brilliant and more than convincing performance, his organic symbiosis with the character, he gratefully opts for the first option. An opportunity well seized. “It has many layers, many faces. As an actor I was interested in highlighting the person behind the politician,” says Morte. Above all, he comments, so that the younger ones understand it: “An audience that we thought about many times during the filming of the series. Even others who are not so young, for example, I am 50 years old, I don’t remember ever having studied this episode at school”.
