'The Brief Life': wigs, period dresses and palaces to laugh at the story

The cold is intense outside El Pardo’s La Quinta del Duque del Arco one morning in late February. The sun is not hot and the wind seems about to lift the tents in which the filming team takes refuge. The short life to eat. Inside this palace, whose interior is not open to the public but its lavish gardens are, several rooms are furnished and decorated from the period. In reality, everything is props, from the tables and chairs to the curtains, and the floors are protected so as not to damage anything. One of the rooms is full of clocks. Playing with the early afternoon backlights, actors Javier Gutiérrez and Carlos Scholz, dressed in 18th century clothing and impossible wigs, record a deep conversation between father and son. It doesn’t seem like it, but we are filming a comedy, signed by Adolfo Valor and Cristóbal Garrido and soon to be released on Movistar Plus+

The two characters are not just any father and son. Javier Gutiérrez is Felipe V, the first Bourbon king in Spain. Carlos Scholz is Louis I, who reigned for just seven months due to his early death. Before he died at the age of 17, he had been married to a cousin he did not know, Luisa de Orleans, and he had to face multiple difficulties. This plot, which could be the basis of a period drama full of palace intrigues, is the breeding ground for a comedy in the hands of Valor and Garrido.

The two scriptwriters found in Luis I the idea for a six-episode miniseries built around four “complex and contradictory” characters, in the words of Adolfo Valor. Along with the two kings, there are their wives, an Isabel de Farnese played by Leonor Watling who “has gone down in history as the bad guy in the movie when she was simply an ambitious woman who did the work that her husband did not want to do,” in words of Cristóbal Garrido, and a Luisa de Orleans (Alicia Armenteros) of whom the chronicles say that she walked around the palace naked, “but if you scratch a little you see that she was a misplaced girl who did not want to be queen and who came from Versailles to a country that was far behind in social evolution,” adds Garrido.

Javier Gutiérrez as Felipe V, on the filming of ‘La vida Breve’ in an image provided by Movistar Plus+.

The result is being cooked these days in a production that has been filmed in the Royal Palace of Aranjuez, the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso (Segovia), the Palace of Santoña, the Charterhouse of Talamanca del Jarama, the Palace of Fernán Núñez, the Finca La Granjilla and the Prado Museum. Access to El Pardo, Aranjuez and the Granja de San Ildelfonso is possible thanks to an agreement with National Heritage, which, as its president, Ana de la Cueva, explains, has one of its priorities as opening up to citizens in order to make it known. Spanish heritage. “Filming allows us to give visibility. And it also means joining the priority that the Administration is giving to the audiovisual sector,” explains De la Cueva, who visits the filming that day.

The creators have thoroughly documented themselves and have a historical advisor so that the facts adjust to reality. “What we don’t know is how they reach these vital decisions. We know that Luis tried to change things, that he wanted to make a budget law that would cut the Crown’s money to stabilize expenses in the country a little. We’re not giving him a progressive touch, it’s just that he tried that. But they knocked it down. In the madness of Felipe V we have had to reduce some things, because what comes from the chronicles was so crazy that you would not believe it,” says Cristóbal Garrido. “As there is so little written about Luis, he gave us the opportunity to have a very elaborate historical context and then to fable and create our universe,” adds Adolfo Valor.

Alicia Armenteros and Carlos Scholz, as Luisa de Orleans and Luis I, at a moment during the filming of 'La vida Breve' in an image provided by Movistar Plus+. — Alicia Armenteros and Carlos Scholz, as Luisa de Orleans and Luis I, at a moment during the filming of ‘La vida Breve’ in an image provided by Movistar Plus+.

Against this historical background, comedy sneaks in as something natural. “The story in itself is quite comical, a boy who has been dreaming all his life of being king and palm at six months is quite sad and pathetic. And in between are all the customs of the protocol of the Spanish Crown, which was very corseted, science was ridiculous, the Church was ridiculous… We have not tightened either the drama or the comedy,” explains Adolfo Valor, who also directs the series with Diego Núñez Irigoyen (Palermo Division).

It is not common to find a period comedy. “It is not usually done because the period is very expensive and, I don’t know why, expensive things tend to be of a different kind,” reflects Leonor Watling. “Everyone told us that times were very complicated, and they didn’t lie to us,” says Adolfo Valor. “It’s complicated, it’s slow. But the nice thing was to tell it as if it were a historical drama,” she adds. The references they used, like the movies Barry Lyndonby Stanley Kubrick, the Amadeus, by Miloš Forman, were not comedy. Although they have filmed part of it on a set, they have tried to record most of it in real places and some places that no longer exist, such as the Buen Retiro Palace, they have recreated with other palaces.

The creators of 'La vida Breve', Cristóbal Garrido and Adolfo Valor, during the filming of the series. — The creators of ‘La vida Breve’, Cristóbal Garrido and Adolfo Valor, during the filming of the series.

A moment from the filming of the comedy 'La vida Breve', which is being filmed these days in locations such as La Quinta del Duque del Arco in El Pardo. — A moment from the filming of the comedy ‘La vida Breve’, which is being filmed these days in locations such as La Quinta del Duque del Arco in El Pardo.

This will be Garrido y Valor’s second collaboration with Movistar Plus+ after Kings of the night, a comedy that was set in the rivalry between two sports journalists on Spanish radio in the eighties, with parallels with the confrontation between José María García and José Ramón de la Morena, and which, although it was renewed, was finally canceled . Can it be understood The short life as compensation for that second season that never happened? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Adolfo Valor says ironically, laughing. “I don’t know if it’s compensation, but if it is, thank you. And if it is not, welcome, because of course, we deserved it,” concludes Cristóbal Garrido.