Berta is a kindergarten teacher and José Ramón is a security guard. They move through life without fuss, not daring to face a family that disrespects them (they give them dry butter!), without funny anecdotes to tell, without knowing how to behave when in front of people they think are cool. Esperanza Pedreño and Raúl Cimas have a particular cadence when it comes to interpreting the characters, without raising their voices, without impetus, but wearing their humanity in each sequence of the Poquita fe series, the comedy that Movistar Plus premieres this Tuesday. "And be careful with what you say about them!" warn the creators Pepón Montero and Juan Maidagán, "because the one who appears on the screen is yourself without going through Instagram."
The first trailer that came out of the project gave a glimpse of a characteristic sense of humor, between costumbrismo, pathos and the absurd, but the public will find a 15-minute format where the rhythm of the comedy does not falter at any moment while addressing situations of the day by day of Berta and Jose Ramón: from their relationship with a homeless man to whom he gives one euro every day, their plans for the holidays or her decision to change her way of dressing with her mother-in-law's clothes. “It is a small series in every way: small in format, small in terms of claims, small in terms of characters”, explain the authors who had written the first season of Camera Café and who created Just before Christ.
"You can think that the characters are pathetic because they don't have great passions, because they are not heroes, but we have never written them looking over our shoulders, rather we feel identified with them," they argue. They are right. As if they were surgeons of habits and customs, they extract from everyday life those details that allow anyone to see themselves reflected on the screen.
His work is, in fact, a claim of ordinary people. "Now everything that sells is glamorous but the mediocre have the right to be happy," they defend, "because we are still happy and we don't need anything else." Why do you have to go to Thailand to justify your existence when you can be happy staying at home on a Friday night in front of the TV?
The secret of Poquita fe is, moreover, in its short nature: "We set out to divide a year in the lives of these characters into 12 15-minute chapters." In Movistar they did not believe them when they saw the scripts, they were not convinced that these texts could last a quarter of an hour: "It is that they are like 22-minute episodes from which you have taken the air off."
And, with drops of mockumentary and series of sketches, they found a dense comedy rhythm, where there is no shortage of jokes in every minute of footage and where they get it right with a precision that is surprising for its naturalness. "In comedy, less is more," say Montero and Maidagán.
The public will be able to verify that they get away with it: Little Faith is a brilliant comedy for those who seek to get away from the noise and laugh from closeness and respect. After all, the viewer has much more in common with Berta, Jose Ramón and their acquaintances than with Carrie Bradshaw.
