Rafael Cobos is very comfortable in Seville... and he knows how to ensure that we are not. Alberto Rodríguez's trusted scriptwriter is now a solo creator. With El hijo zurdo, a series recently released on Movistar, Cobos shows that he is perfectly prepared to fly alone. Without leaving his city, yes. You know: that thing that the most local is always the most universal. The left-handed son could not be more local and yet he has just won a very important prize at the Cannesseries Festival, where his extreme Sevillianism does not matter to them. It is not an exotic series, it is a good series.
There is no script by Cobos that has not managed to make me uncomfortable. In La peste (2018), his exploration of the human condition was somewhat overshadowed by the overwhelming production of Movistar's first megaproject, but on other occasions, as in the unfairly little-remembered After (2009), his gaze on our miseries is the Absolute center of the story. And hurts.
The absolutely contemporary and nightmarish Seville of After is very similar to that of El hijo zurdo. A bright and vibrant city but also full of forgotten corners, outcasts from the system and problems to be solved. We can believe that those of Lola (María León) and hers, her son Lorenzo (Hugo Welzel) are metaphors. We can also read them literally and enjoy the series only as a plot. That's how I did it, preventing The Left-Handed Son from doing me too much damage.
There are stories that put you in front of your prejudices. This is one of them. Prejudices about poverty and wealth, classist preconceptions about "what is Andalusian" or reductionist ideas about having children and knowing how to educate them. It could be that Lola has not known how to raise hers. Or it could be all much more complicated. Because everything is always much more complicated.
El hijo zurdo, which adapts a novel by Rosario Izquierdo, would not be possible on television without the very personal vision of Rafael Cobos. Neither without interpretations like those of María León or Hugo Welzel. She makes us love a Lola who couldn't be more confused (wrong?) and he makes us not see him as another conflicted teenager. A "son/problem", as I heard the other day.
The wonderful Tamara Casellas is not a friend/enemy to use either. Maru, her character is, as Casellas defines it, "the light of the series". And light is something that is greatly missed here. Seville has a special color and in El hijo zurdo that color is dark gray, bordering on black. A twilight and threatening city. A dangerous place where (is it also a metaphor?) it even rains.
Rafael Cobos is not one of those writers who "sell" his series in the first episode. He assumes that we will see it in its entirety. Yours is something else. Something that for some will be anti-television, but that, without a doubt, has its place in a panorama, that of current series, where almost everyone calls themselves an author and very few are. Rafael Cobos is, and with El hijo zurdo he shows it again.
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