Love After Music Review: Also known as El Amor Después del Amor, this Spanish series stars Ivan Hochman as Fito Páez, Micaela Riera as Fabiana Cantilo, Nahuel Monasterio as Fena, Daryna Butryk as Cecilia Roth and Javier Morado as Andrés Calamaro alongside other cast members. The series is directed by the duo Felipe Gómez Aparicio and Gonzalo Tobal. It is written by Juan Matias Carballo, Diego Fió, Lucila Podestá and Francisco Varone.
– The Love After Music Review Does Not Contain Spoilers –
While this series encapsulates the rage, the tenacity and the aesthetic of the 80s, there are still a lot of missing links that make this project more incomplete than fun. It starts off strong with some artistic cuts and brilliant editing transitions, but it refuses to keep up the same energy throughout the series. Moreover, the technique they brought to the montages is oddly irrelevant. They have tried to tie in the storyline of the young artist with his current life, and the symbolic truth is truly isolated.
There are moments, however, that make this series, interesting to watch. The first one is that they move away from the trope where the parent is unsupportive of the child’s dreams and instead forces them to pursue something they don’t want to do. Another is that they’ve decided to include many people in the series, which accurately presents the process of how music is made and how things were back in the day.
But if there is another trope they can retire, it is the tortured musician on a drug-addled bender because of trauma. While the creators may have wanted to stick to the brutally honest depiction of life back in the 80s, what it also does is glorify a set of characteristics associated with legends at the time. Once again, the stories involving most rock musicians in the 80s include some kind of drug abuse and trouble with a romantic partner. Bingo, we got both in this.
It is a tired storyline, but the kind of lived experiences this artist comes from truly exacerbates all the cliches that come later in his life. A story about a young boy who was born in the 60s. The life at the time and the consequent rise of political instability contributed to the story subtly. If the show had taken a deeper exploration into the political deal of his music, there would have been more of an impact in charting the artist’s life as a musician.
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Even the way the episodes have been divided is disjointed. The writer and director tried to divide the long story into chapters, and while that generally works well for a story like this, the changes between each episode must be seamless to make it seem coherent. This series felt like a collection of events happening to the person without an end goal in sight. If showing a rock bottom and then the come-up was what the writers were going for, then they have failed.
In a similar vein, the montages and parallel cuts that show his younger days and his professional life are also disjointed enough that they don’t convey a specific meaning. Furthermore, some storylines from the younger days weren’t appropriately resolved. The lack of closure on some of these sub-plots contributes to a sub-par feeling at the end of the series. What should be triumphant is mostly left mildly enjoyable. Additionally, how the creators have moved audiences from time and place created a distance from the plot that wasn’t crossed as the episodes progressed.
Love After Music Review: Final Thoughts
If audiences are looking to get an up-close personal look at the artist’s life, this is a great show. Because it doesn’t flinch away from the darkness of his life and instead faces it head-on, with a surprising amount of grace and demure; however, if someone were looking to get a look into the musical process of this singer, they would be thoroughly disappointed. Even though this artist is known for his work during a regime when a certain kind of music was outlawed, there is little to almost no exploration of how he does that in the series.
It must be noted, though, that the main cast members have done a great job coming to this era and fitting into it like a glove. They have managed to tell a story by removing themselves from the people in reality and instead bringing their iteration to these characters.
Love After Music is currently streaming on Netflix.
What did you think of this rendition of the artist’s life story? Let us know in the comments below.
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