Joserra had a promising badminton career ahead of him. He even competed in the Barcelona Olympics. Now he makes a living as a gym teacher at a high school while training promising young badminton players who he dreams of reaching Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, where the best in the sport go. But to reach the promised land you must first win at Fuenlabrada, Totana or Ponferrada.
Although behind the new Movistar Plus+ series is screenwriter Diego San José (Eight Basque surnames, Celeste, Vote John) and Joserra is played by Javier Cámara, Jakarta It is by no means a comedy and, as the episodes progress, the protagonist’s wounds come to the surface.
Diego San José guarantees that he has a certain “lifelong obsession” with losers. “I needed to dedicate an entire series to the concept of defeat, to the fact of living in permanent loss after defeat. Give a kick to the culture of victory and success, that thing we are taught since we were little about chasing our dreams, making us believe that dreams come true when you chase them. Jakarta It’s the opposite, you don’t heal until you accept defeat, embrace it and stop looking for a victory that could possibly be out of your hands”, he states.
In Jakartabadminton is just an excuse. In fact, throughout the series we don’t see a single match. “Whoever wins a badminton match in Torrelavega or Ponferrada is very similar to a loser. It’s a sport that won’t change your life. Badminton is just an excuse to delve into the soul of a man defeated by life, divorced, who barely sees his daughter, abandoned by his friends when he needed them most, expelled from the badminton federation. A story with a gray tone and increasingly painful.
Directed by Elena Trapé, with whom San José has worked Blue sky. “We both share the desire to be austere, not to look for easy tears or to delight in comedy by encouraging jokes. It had to be a very sober series, which conveyed that there was a previous wound and loneliness through the weight of the camera and the staging”, says the director of four of the six episodes (the other two are directed by Fernando Delgado-Hierro and Javier Cámara himself). Another challenge, says Trapé, was removing Joserra from Javier Cámara’s charisma. “This happens through the characterization, the makeup, the costumes and the gestures themselves. I remember telling him a lot to keep his arms still”, he adds.
From the beginning of the story, Joserra looked like the protagonist of Rapa. The series creator explains how the first glimpse of what ended up being Jakarta It came about when they were both recording the political comedy Come on John (third part Vote John). “Javi (Javier Cámara) has been thinking about the series for years. When there was news with Carolina Marín or when he passed by an ugly sports center during a photo shoot, he would send me a photo. The young Carla Quílez also has a dizzying career. At the age of 14 she won the Silver Shell for The maternal and now, at 17, he stars Jakarta and participate in the series Puberty and tell me your name. “She was always the first option. We made a foundry game and we really enjoyed it because she wanted to win, there was a competitiveness about her that gave us a sign that it had to be her”, recalls Elena Trapé.
Between championship and championship towards Jakarta, the series uncovers the questions that it initially hides and about which it only gives clues, questions whose discovery is part of the journey that the viewer undertakes (and that if you prefer not to know, it is better not to continue reading). “Things are emerging in children’s sport that we were not aware of when I was a child. Now we are more aware that there are dynamics between coaches and their students that can have a lifelong impact on a moral and ethical level. Normally we think that in classrooms, in noble and recognized disciplines, there is the education of young people, but I believe that in gymnasiums and on playing fields, in the small dynamics of sport, there are hidden ethical values that will haunt us more than a geography class. demos sport has a playful meaning and we see this in winning or not winning a game, and we should see it in winning or not winning some values”, says Diego San José. This is where the sexual abuse that will mark Joserra’s life infiltrates.
Another serious problem that comes to light at the end of the series (although clues are given from the first episode) is gambling addiction, a scourge that the screenwriter wanted to address with the seriousness it deserves. “It has surrounded us all our lives in a very silent way because you don’t see the addicted gambler, he doesn’t change physically, and in fact it is dangerously linked to a beautiful verb, ‘he likes to play’, a verb that we link to our childhood. People don’t do good things, they invoke misfortunes, people who have no other solution who, because they don’t win anything, try to beat the bingo card.” San José was surprised to discover that there is a list of people who are prohibited from accessing these facilities, but to be included on that list, the person himself has to take the giant step of reporting to a police station.
And so, San José constructed an ode to defeat in six chapters of just over half an hour. “Defeat is a natural state that is much more permanent than victory. We all lose sometimes every day, and defeats make us mature much more. When you turn off the light after a victory and go to sleep, you don’t have to process anything. But when you lose, and I’m not talking about sport, I’m talking about life in general, you have to explain the defeats, you have to justify them and get used to living with a version of yourself that is not the best. Losing is good for us, “You are your best authentic version when you lost. So, I’ve been around losers my whole life,” he concludes.