This weekend I was looking for something different to watch without knowing exactly what, so I started looking at Prime Video's catalog, and an image stopped me in my tracks: Carlos Saúl Menem's face, framed by the Argentine flag and a blunt title: Menem. I didn't hesitate and pressed play.
The miniseries, produced in Argentina and launched by Amazon Prime, surprised me from the first moment for its narrative framework in a key stage of Argentine history. It is not only about politics, but it transcends the institutional story and takes us into a kind of magical realism, if you will. Where politics and show business mix without asking permission, and without realizing it, it is part of Argentine folklore and pop culture.
I want to highlight three moments that, for me, summarize the spirit of the series:
1. The breast cancer awareness campaign: Yes, that act that every time an Argentinean pronounces said surname, he touches his breast or another part of his body, depending on whether he is a man or a woman. So I thought it was a brilliant idea to use marketing as a public health tool, presented in a way that was as unexpected as it was effective. A clear example of how the bizarre can be at the service of the useful.
2. The narrative approach with mystical overtones: The miniseries is not only limited to documenting Menem's arrival to power and his first term in office, but there is something more. A symbolic construction, almost esoteric, that presents him as a mythological figure, as if his rise was written by the stars and not by the ballot box, since it plays with mysticism, that which all Argentines believe but do not say. To this we add religion and family, which play an extremely important role in the plot, by mixing all these elements, this tension between the real and the fantastic gives the series a unique and spectacular tone.
3. Acting: And last but not least, the tremendous performance of Leonardo Sbaraglia, who undoubtedly is the one who totally and completely takes all the spotlight, without detracting Griselda Sicialini and Juan Minujín, but Sbaraglia's performance is simply perfect, as I had to watch interviews of Carlos Saul to see how he was, and there comes a point that you do not know if the real Menem takes over the actor's body.
Menem is not just a series about an ex-president, it is a journey to the heart of the Argentine chaos of the 90's, with an aesthetic as powerful as it is polemic, and perhaps for that very reason, it is a must-see.
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