Caray, Caray!

If you’ve seen the first few episodes of Aurora, you’ve surely noticed the family resemblance to El Clon. In fact, it seems we are in the presence of a new genre of telenovela, one part science fiction, one part fairy tale. It’s a romance that’s not a comedy (at least not intentionally), but it isn’t a tragedy either with the blood sacrifices that would require.

Take one pair of star-crossed lovers, one set of snooty-patooty parents and one mad scientist with a God complex, season with envy, stir gently, and marinate in the refrigerator for twenty years.

The princess here is a lovely twenty-something dance student, Aurora, who falls in love with Lorenzo, a talented and beautiful dancer. They are kept apart by false friends, social class, their own stubborn pride and finally, by Aurora’s illness, an infection certain to be fatal. Her father, Dr Gustavo Ponce de Leon [hah!], won’t allow her to die. He keeps her frozen in his very own cryonics laboratory while he waits for medicine to find a cure for her illness. She is La Bella Durmiente (Sleeping Beauty) for our time. La Princesa de Hielo (The Ice Princess). And just to show us what a sentimental guy he really is, the doc has also turned Aurora’s dog, Lucero, (not so inside joke?) -- who was dying of sadness after losing her mistress – into a pooch on ice, complete with her own cryocapsule.

Gustavo spends a lot of time contemplating his daughter turned popsicle, wrapped in her cryo-undies and suspended in her capsule. It feels a bit creepy and vaguely incestuous.

And then -- a twenty year leap forward. Aurora still looks like Aurora (Sara Maldonado), except she’s um… well, not exactly alive. But all the other twenty-somethings have morphed into different actors.

Eugenio Siller’s winsome young Lorenzo, for example, has matured into a hunky forty-something Jorge Luis Pila. [Now I understand why all the twenty-somethings looked exactly the same twenty years later on El Clon: they were kept on ice!]

And their offspring, the new generation of twenty-somethings are the spitting image of their like-sexed parent. [If we didn’t know better, we’d be tempted to say they were clones! Perhaps after the Bedouins rescued Albieri in the desert, he found refuge in the more permissive environment of the New York medical community and was responsible for cloning this new generation.] Lorenzo’s young son, Martín, has grown up to be Eugenio Siller. You can see how confusing it will be for Aurora.

The only non-clonish member of this new generation is Aurora’s own daughter, Blanca. Blanca never knew her mother. She thinks Dr. and Sra Ponce de Leon are her parents and Aurora is her sister. Lorenzo, her actual father, doesn’t know of her existence.

Blanca resents Aurora – she refers to her contemptuously as ‘La congelada’ (the frozen one). She perceives (accurately) that Dr. Ponce de Leon has spent all his emotional capital on Sleeping Beauty and has nothing left for Bitter Blanca.

[The over-forty actors get to play themselves twenty years later. I mean really, between forty and death, well, who the hell cares?]

The world hasn’t stopped spinning while Beauty has been asleep. It should be easy enough for her to get used to cell phones and computers and the death of Celia Cruz. But it will be harder to assimilate the changes in her Prince’s life: for the past fifteen years, he has been married to Aurora’s best friend, Natalia. They have raised 3 children: his Martín (identical to young Lorenzo); her Nina (identical to young Natalia; we don’t know who Nina’s biological father is); and their César.

There are lots of close-ups of lovely faces, touristy images of Manhattan, pretty dance studio shots. The actors are engaging and know their job. The Mexican Spanish is easy to follow and the Spanish captions, thus far, have been working well. All told, the ice may be a little thin, but it should be fun to skate on for a while.

And on bleak nights, we can always count on the occasional howler to keep us amused. Check out the writing over Martín’s bed: STRENGHT & HONOR! Indeed.

Anyone else watching? ¿Alguien más lo mira?

Labels: aurora, clon, telemundo