In Money Heist they fell in love with Berlin. It's that easy. Pedro Alonso allowed himself to be possessed by the theatricality when he played the most disturbing thief in the Professor's gang, the one who believed it was possible to try to forcibly seduce the hostages. It was proven in the last two seasons of the robbery series, in which the character was recovered through flashbacks that helped eliminate that villainous patina, and now that Berlin, a prequel designed to showcase Alonso, is directly released.
Berlin is the same but not exactly. Álex Pina's plan for Money Heist was calculated to the millimeter. There was a thriller with a sense of a classic blockbuster with Álvaro Morte instructing the thieves in a crazy operation. There were scenes of drama exacerbated by hearing the musings of Tokyo, the character of Úrsula Corberó, who also tried to get the viewer on her side with a few drops of populist social denunciation. And, with the help of Jesús Colmenar's direction and Migue Amoedo's photography, the show was sold: until then, no one would have thought that such a Hollywood series could come out of Spain.
In Berlin, Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato, who was in the writers' room of La casa de papel and is his creative partner (they created Vis a vis, El Embaradero or Sky Rojo together), offer a more casual robbery, directly anchored in comedy, where setbacks are constructed as entanglements.
Here, long before being diagnosed with a terminal illness, Berlin prepares the robbery of 44 million in jewels in a Paris gallery with the help of Tristán Ulloa (Fariña), Begoña Vargas (Welcome to Eden), Michelle Jenner (You do it too would you do), Julio Peña Fernández (Through my window) and Joel Sánchez. However, the protagonist, who is trying to recover from a failed relationship, soon loses concentration when he discovers how charming the gallery director's wife is.
The viewer can imagine exactly what kind of series Berlin is: a diversion where the commitment to reality is weak but which works as long as the plots, like the robbery, are in motion. But it doesn't work in the same way as La casa de papel.
We saw more spectacular robberies. The dynamic of the team, which is always perceived as B-movie, consists of being attractive, horny and eager (unfortunately, acting work seems to have to be measured by whether they sell that they are extremely hot or not). And there is excessive confidence in Berlin, who was a more than effective villain at the beginning of Money Heist and who has now become a romantic comedy heartthrob. Where is an introspective analysis of the evil lover?
In the first episode, in fact, the writers hint at a more stimulating series based on the love-bombing of a problematic man, as if this spin-off had You by Sera Gamble as a reference, but they soon forget about the toxic potential of Berlin ( and what to say about it) to lend themselves to romantic entanglement without a critical or challenging sense. It is at that moment that Berlin creatively surrenders to being a mere fantasy: one where the pieces do not quite fit together.
Neither the Andrés de Fonollosa that we met in Money Heist is the man we have here, nor does his problematic romantic mission combine well with the robbery carried out by his functional and sexy henchmen.
