‘It Starts About a Couple, Ends Up About Life’

October 18, 20246 Mins Read

As Spanish TV production stands strong, largely resisting the cut-back in commissions suffered in most of the world, few higher profile new series will be brought to market at Mipcom than Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The New Years” (“Los años nuevos”).

A Movistar Plus+ Original, produced with Caballo Films (“La Ruta,” “The Wailing”), the fast-rising Sorogoyen co-founded Madrid production label, in association with Arte France, “The New Years” follows on Sorogoyen’s “The Beasts,” which established him as one of Europe’s youngest top-tier filmmakers.

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Few other directors will have won a Best Foreign Film César, as “The Beasts” did in 2023, beating four Cannes Festival 2022-23 competition winners: “Triangle of Sadness,” “EO,” “Close” and “Boy from Heaven.” Not that many will have grossed $2.5 million in France with a Spanish-language film as well as an extraordinary €6.8 million ($7.5 million) in Spain, despite its artistic ambition.

Sold outside Spain and France by Movistar Plus+ International, “The New Years” world premiered at the Venice Film Festival in august company, alongside new series from Alfonso Cuarón, Thomas Vinterberg and Joe Wright. Many Spanish critics have hailed it as the Spanish series of the year.

A neo-Western turning on conflict negotiation, “The Beasts” offered two contrasting parts. Created with Sara Cano (“Angela”) and Paula Fabra (“A Private Affair”), “The New Years” also plays with structure. Cinema, Sorogoyen insists, “The New Years” will screen in the entirety at the Valladolid Film Festival and then hit Spanish cinema theaters in Spain before bowing on Movistar Plus+ from Nov. 28. The series has two five-episode parts with no credit crawls nor intertitles between episodes. Each episode updates on Ana (Iría del Río, “Riot Police”) and Oscar (Francesco Carril, “Galgos”) from the New Year’s Eve of 2015 when they meet, catching them on the same day every year over the next decade.

That structure “allows you to consider change,” Movistar Plus+ Director of Fiction and Entertainment Domingo Corral said at Series Mania, announcing the partnership with Arte France.

“The New Years” asks how much people change or rid their inner demons, as it posits a common relationship paradox: the same divergent qualities which attract Ana and Oscar to one another – her spontaneity, ability to live in the moment, his stability – also threaten to derail their relationship. Sorogoyen brings a sense of sub-genre to a series where every episode varies in tone from the couple’s cute-meet (Ep. 1) to recognition of love (Ep. 2) to romcom (Ep.3), family drama (Ep.4), and horror-tinged rupture (Ep. 5), and then five episodes afterwords, one from his point of view (Ep. 6), another from hers (Ep. 7) as they mull getting together again.

Yet, Sorogoyen insists, “The New Years” begins about a couple, ends up about life: Friends fade away, a parent dies, there are babies, couples separate.

Episodes are shot with a basic naturalism and a Sorogoyen hallmark tendency to sequence shots climaxing in a virtuoso Ep. 10 single shot lasting 40 minutes.

Variety talked to Sorogoyen before “The New Years” Spanish premiere at Valladolid, where the series bids fair to be one of the festival’s major highlights.

“The New Years” is a series, playing off the possibility for ellipsis between episodes, but its style is totally cinematographic….

TV allows us to make longer films. For me “The New Years” is a movie rather like “The Best of Youth” split into two movies, here of 180 and 220 minutes. Some TV series go on in order to hit required running length. In our case, there’s a very precise screenplay, which has really been worked at a lot so that this doesn’t happen, so that every and every single minute counts.

The film registers key moments in a relationship, such as the shock of rupture, the sheer fun and ease of being together in love’s first bloom, or the first symptoms of tension….

We spoke a lot about key moments we had to hit, but they’re not necessarily in the series. Each episode is 24 hours maximum, so between this and the next lie 364 days. So we had to make nine more screenplays, about what happens in them and many of the key moments take place between one episode and another, such as between Episode 3 and Episode 4, when they start living together. The spectator doesn’t see it, but can imagine it, and register the consequences days or months later in Episode 4. It’s pretty difficult for a key moment in a relationship to occur on New Year’s Eve. This was a handicap, but fun facing that challenge.

The episodes vary a lot in tone, pace…

The [overriding] tone is naturalist or at least verosimil. But we wanted the episodes to be different, Yes, the fourth for example has their families eating New Year’s Eve dinner and five people talking all the time, and the next, set in Berlin, is about an outer and inner journey and one of silences. We wanted every episode to have its own clearly defined personality and setting.

It’s notable that the most developed male characters, Oscar and Guille, are both fragile…

We tried to portray characters which are interesting and today masculine characters which are interesting have a certain sensibility, insecurities and weaknesses linking more to today’s reality.

Another theme is communication, or the lack of it….

I’d say the difficulty of communication. The lack of it is one large reason for couple’s conflicts.

Catching characters one day each year, “The New Years” inevitably talks about the passage of time and asks if people change. And the film’s answer is ‘yes.’

Yes, inevitably, people mature and in Ana’s case that maturity is a life’s journey where she ends up finding her place in the world.

The Mexican writer-director Guillermo Arriaga once said that you should be able to sum up in a few words what your work is about.

I’m slightly reluctant to define our work,. But I’d say that “The New Years” begins talking about a couple and ends up talking about life. You start off believing you’re seeing a film about a boy and girl falling in love. You see that in Episodes 1-3, and are delighted, I hope, to see it. But after that the couple is less important and it’s more about her life and his life, about motherhood and losing loved ones, how friends go away, losing friendships, and how you find your place in the world or believe you do or ask: ‘What am I doing with my life?’ ‘Do I have to do something with my life?’