Miguel Sáez Carral’s The Gardener (El Jardinero in Spanish) has little to do with gardening, plenty to do with crime, and crime of a very strange type with a mother egging on her impressionable, psychologically disturbed son to kill for money.
Problems arise in this problematic series when the son Elmer (Álvaro Rico) falls in love with an intended victim Violeta (Catalina Sopelana). Elmer’s over-possessive mother La China (Cecilia Suárez) doesn’t take too kindly to her son’s overlapping interests. How can he mix business with pleasure? The goat doesn’t make friends with the grass, etc. etc.
I am not saying she says these exact words. But the drift of the drama is so clichéd, characters speak like they are reading off a teleprinter. The landscape and the foliage, the clumps of cultivated greenery certainly have more character than the drama that plays in the foreground.
There is something slightly amusing in the way the series camouflages the bland for the grand. And trades common sense for boundless absurdities. To cite an example, the mother objects to her son’s closeness to the girl, so she puts on a wig (she was an actress in her past) and plots to kill the girl.
Even more fundamentally, why would a woman train her son to be an assassin? Is it to get away from the treacly tropes of the cine-Maa? Sorrily, the more the series tries to escape the tropes, the more trite and predictable it appears.
There is a rich grieving mother (Emma Suárez) who holds her dead son’s girlfriend responsible for his death and wants the girl to be bumped off.
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All this sounds far more complicated than it actually is, although the deceptively dense writing would have us believe otherwise. The characters are all cardboard-stiff, trying to look important and, worse, mysterious. The girl Violeta keeps changing her attitude towards Elmer, who goes from feelingless (a brain strain after a road accident) to emotional as love strikes.
Then there are two cops, one female and the other male, investigating a series of missing persons’ whereabouts and hitting snags throughout. The entire investigation converges on the two law enforcers played by Francis Lorenzo and María Vázquez. The rest of the police force seems to have gone off to watch Fernando Eimbcke’s Mexican film Club Sandwich, which seems to have inspired this series.
