Joserra had a promising badminton career ahead of her. He also competed at the Barcelona Olympic Games. Now he earns a living as a gym teacher in a high school while training promising young badminton players with whom he dreams of reaching Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, where the best of this sport go. But to reach the promised land you must first win in Fuenlabrada, Totana or Ponferrada.
Even if behind the new Movistar Plus+ series there is the screenwriter Diego San José (Eight Basque surnames, Celeste, Vote for Juan) and Joserra is played by Javier Cámara, Jakarta It’s not a comedy at all, and as the episodes progress, the protagonist’s wounds come to light.
Diego San José claims to have a certain “permanent obsession” with losers. “I needed to dedicate an entire series to the concept of defeat, to living in one permanent defeat after another. Let’s kick the culture of victory and success, that thing they teach us from an early age about chasing our dreams, making us believe that dreams come true when you chase them. Jakarta It’s the opposite, you don’t heal until you accept defeat, embrace it, and stop pursuing a victory that might be out of your hands,” he says.
In Jakartabadminton is just an excuse. In fact, in the entire series, we don’t see a single match. “Whoever wins a badminton match in Torrelavega or Ponferrada is very similar to a loser. It’s a sport that won’t change your life. In a series about defeat, seeing two characters chasing a victory that the viewer knows won’t change their life by going to uncharismatic cities to do something that has no glory, is very consistent.” Badminton is just an excuse to delve into the soul of a man defeated by life, divorced, who barely sees his daughter, abandoned by friends when he needed them most, expelled from the badminton federation. A story with gray tones and increasingly painful.
The direction is by Elena Trapé, with whom San José has already worked Sky blue. “We both share the desire to be austere, not to look for easy tears or to have fun in comedy by encouraging jokes. It had to be a very sober series, which conveyed a previous wound and loneliness through the weight of the camera and the staging,” says the director of four of the six episodes (the other two are directed by Fernando Delgado-Hierro and Javier Cámara himself). Another challenge, says Trapé, was depriving Joserra of Javier Cámara’s charisma. “This comes through characterization, makeup, costumes and the gestures themselves. I remember often telling him to keep his arms still,” he adds.
From the beginning of the story, Joserra had the face of the protagonist Turnip. The creator of the series explains how it was the first taste of what he became Jakarta It emerged while both were recording the political comedy Come on, John (third part of Vote for Juan). “Javi (Javier Cámara) had been thinking about the series for years. When there was news with Carolina Marín or when he passed an ugly sports center during a shoot, he sent me a photo. He is one of the best Spanish actors of recent years, with incredible skill in both comedy and drama,” says San José. The young Carla Quílez also has a dizzying career behind her. At the age of 14 he won the Silver Shell The maternal and now, at 17, he’s acting Jakarta and participate in the series Puberty AND tell me your name. “She was always the first option. We did a fusion match and we liked her a lot because she wanted to win, there was a competitiveness in her that made us understand that it had to be her”, recalls Elena Trapé.
Between championship and championship, aiming at Jakarta, the series brings to light the themes that it initially hides and on which it only gives clues, themes whose discovery is part of the journey that the viewer undertakes (and which if you prefer not to know it is better not to continue reading). “Things emerge in children’s sports that we were not aware of when I was a child. Now we are more aware that there are dynamics between coaches and their students that can have repercussions on a moral and ethical level for life. Normally we think that in school classrooms, in noble and recognized subjects, there is the education of young people, but I believe that in gyms and playgrounds, in the small dynamics of sport, there are hidden ethical values that will persecute us more than a geography lesson. To play sport we have them given a playful meaning and we see it by winning or not winning a game, and we should see it by winning or not winning some values,” says Diego San José. This is where the sexual abuse that will mark Joserra’s life creeps in.
Another serious problem that comes to light later in the series (even if the clues are already given in the first episode) is that of gambling addiction, a plague that the screenwriter wanted to address with the seriousness it deserves. “It has surrounded us throughout our lives in a very silent way because the addicted player cannot be seen, does not change physically, and in fact is dangerously linked to a beautiful verb, ‘he likes to play’, a verb that we linked to our childhood. I remember that as a child I felt in my house that there was someone who liked to play and I thought: ‘how nice, me too’. And that game destroys lives. The bingos that surround provincial cities, usually in neighborhoods where people don’t do things well, invoke the unfortunates, people who have no other solution and who, having won nothing, try to beat the bingo card. San José was surprised to discover that there is a list of people who are prohibited from accessing these premises, but to be included in this list, the person himself must take the giant step of reporting himself to a police station.
And so, San José has constructed a hymn to defeat in six chapters of just over half an hour. “Defeating is a much more permanent natural state than winning. We all lose sometimes every day, and defeats make us mature much more. When you turn off the light after a victory and go to sleep, you don’t have to process anything. But when you lose, and I’m not talking about sports, I’m talking about life in general, you have to explain the defeats, you have to justify them and get used to living with a version of yourself that is not the best. Losing makes us good,” You are your most authentic version when you have lost. So I’ve always been with the underdogs my whole life,” he concludes.
