Nadia from Santiago She already had extensive experience in television when she signed to be one of the protagonists of ‘Las chicas del cable’, a series with which I admit that I never finished connecting. After finishing his participation in said series of Netflix, the actress decided to extend her link with the platform with ‘The time I give you’, a miniseries that she herself has created with Pablo Sanchidrián and Ines Painter.
Of course, it is not a miniseries to use, since they have taken advantage of their experience in the field of short film to approach its premise from a rather peculiar perspective. And it is that during the 10 episodes of 11 minutes each one jumps between the happy past and the painful present, with an increasing presence of the latter, thus showing the process of mourning and overcoming. The result is the best spanish Netflix series so far, which you can see from this Wednesday, October 29.
An exhilarating storytelling game
It is often said that time heals everything and that is one of the ideas that ‘The time I give you’ explores, since Lina, the character played by Nadia de Santiago, is the main ally to overcome her break with Nico (Alvaro Cervantes), her first love. As I pointed out before, this is something that finds its reflection in the narrative used, something that the scripts of it know how to adjust in a more than remarkable way to the episodic nature of the format.
And is that each episode brings new details to both what brought Lina and Nico together and what precipitated their breakup. In this way, ‘The time I give you’ starts by focusing exclusively on them and opens the range to other characters as the episodes go by and there begins to be room for something else, which does not mean that it is a process of what more complicated.
That is what enables that narrative game that the series handles with ease, rightly integrating time jumps instead of just showing ourselves we are now in the present and now in the past. There ‘The time that I give you’ flows, achieving a synergy with the viewer’s own thoughts about when something provokes the arrival of a memory that is now especially painful.
As expected, the axis of the series is her, which allows once again to show that sweetness that at least I have always associated with Nadia de Santiago, but stripping herself of all artifice to expose her closest and most fragile side. This does much easier for the viewer to put themselves in their shoes and that emotions run the same both for it and for us.
Conquers you from simplicity
Besides, all that it is achieved from simplicity and naturalness, both in the dialogues of its protagonists, which really feel like something that a couple could say in each of the different moments in which they find themselves, as in the staging work of Sanchidrián and Pintor, although it does show there a certain tendency to embellish the image, always associated with the emotions they seek to convey and the intimacy of the moment instead of falling into unnecessary tricks.
Another unexpected achievement of the series is that knows how to transmit the passage of time very well, since it tells us both the breakup and the grieving process as well as the beginning of the romance and how everything ends up deteriorating. There are not a few works that fail at this point and here they manage to do so without losing freshness and with a very tight duration.
Each episode feels like a fairly concrete moment and a more or less direct consequence of the above on both timelines, also achieving a peculiar harmony, since it is clear that much more time passes in the past than in the present.
The icing on the cake is the work of your cast, where, obviously, Nadia de Santiago and Álvaro Cervantes stand out. The two approach their interpretations from the everyday, leaving aside the great dramatic explosions, and that the series starts precisely with the break, to transmit a lot with little.
It is true that along the way there may be some little underline That is a bit obvious, but even then one does not stop feeling that ‘The time that I give you’ is telling what you want in the way that the story asks. Of course, there remains the question of whether doing the same from his perspective would not be the perfect complement to have a really complete drawing of what happened, but hey, enough is what ‘The time I give you’ already gives.
In short
‘The time that I give you’ is a series in appearance very small but at the moment of truth touches greatness in what is proposed, especially in that wonderful portrait of the mourning process after the end of love for a couple. It is becoming more and more unusual that a television fiction stays in your head long after you finish watching it and that is what has happened to me with the new Spanish Netflix series.