Even Pope Francis has a hardback copy of his graphic novel. He has a loving relationship with his glamorous wife, who travels the world. As a globally renown cartoonist, he can afford a carer for his parents.
On face value, Ariel has it all. In fact, the protagonist of Daniel Burman’s “So Far, So Good,” Ariel has a bit too much: Five children from three marriages, two cats and two ageing parents.
“Has anybody seen my charger?” Ariel asks at breakfast in early Episode 1 of “So Far, So Good,” the latest from Oficina Burman, part of The Mediapro Studio which market premieres at this week’s Berlinale Series Market.
“Has anybody seen my small padlock?” Ariel (Benjamin Vicuña) also enquires. Though all his family is home, nobody answers. Emerging from his bedroom, he advances down a corridor towards the door, dodging children while a son makes an infernal racket playing the piano, the camera following crazily, as if shooting a scene in a war zone.
Turning 50, at the gym for the first time in 10 years to get into shape to accept an Vatican award for his work, Ariel starts lifting weights and has a hernia. The muscles on his left side, his doctor tells him not very encouragingly, looks like “Kobe meat about to disintegrate.”
Launching Oficina Burman in 2014, Burman has created notable series, such a “Iosi, the Regretful Spy,” an infiltrator thriller reckoned the best TV work at Berlin in 2022.
Over the course of 30 years, Burman, a leading light of the New Argentine Cinema, has built a career teasing with upbeat humor the neuroses, complications and ironies of life. Created by Burman, and co-directed with Daniel Hendler who won a Berlin best actor Silver Bear for his performance in Burman’s “Lost Embrace,” “So Far, So Good” is no exception.
It’s also one of Burman’s most autobiographical works, he confesses. Fittingly and adding a sense of authenticity to “So Far, So Good” Burman is 10 minutes late for an interview with Variety because he’s at a doctor’s having a dodgy knee tended in an oxygen chamber before he travels to Berlin to present “So Far, So Good,” one of 20 titles at Berlinale Series Market Selects.
Ariel’s hernia, his reduced mobility, weighs in as part of a larger picture, his lack of empowerment in mid-age crisis.
“It is made flesh,” says Burman. But what weighs on Ariel is more “emotional” than “physical,” he goes on to say.
“Over the last years, there’s been a very necessary movement of films and series about women with women characters. That’s very important. It’s as if this has happened, however, in detriment of portraits of male reality when in reality the two realities co-exist,” Burman reflects.
Sold by The Mediapro Studio Distribution, “So Far, So Good” has a male protagonist whose conflict, Burman says, is “not violence nor with femininity but more existential, the moment when he begins to be father of his parents, as if he’s going to stop being a son, and nobody is going to look after him, and that doesn’t make sense.”
Ariel is, however, in constant demand. When a Papal prelate urges him to write his acceptance speech over the upcoming weekend, Ariel explains to him that his weekends are not his own: “My son’s performing at a comedy show, the daughter I have to drive everywhere, the other son plays the piano all day, I have two babies, plus two cats, and surely one of my wife’s friends will host a barbecue an hour from home. And I was thinking of visiting my folks, checking that they’re still alive.”
Yet, the series bears no sense of victimization, Burman insists. Ariel is fruit of his own decisions and circumstances. “It was unimaginable just 10 years ago to make a series whose male protagonist needs attention. Now it’s a interesting take: the invisibility of a man of a certain age who needs affection and attention.”
Burman calls “So Far, So Good” an “andropause comedy told with a lot of humor and emotion.”
That emotion looks to lift off in later episodes. For Burman, “There’s an beautiful anecdote told in the series about groups of butterflies which are called kaleidoscopes, because it’s an optical illusion that they’re together, they’re not a family, just moving closely together. Many times families are an optical illusion as well.”
“Ariel realizes he’ll have to bear the weight of his parents’ decline and he can’t ask anybody else to do that. A butterfly leaves behind a cocoon and then flies. One changes every day, leaving things behind. Children leave and leave a toy. All these things left behind along one’s life journey is not a source of conflict but identity. We’re what’s left behind when there’s nothing left to share out or lose and can reconcile ourselves with the idea that we’re a left-behind,” Burman concludes.
“So Far, So Good” is produced by Argentina’s Oficina Burman and Uruguay H.Q.-ed Cimarrón. Both The Mediapro Studio companies, they produce the six-part series for Flow, the Argentine cable TV, internet and SVOD operator. Flow has acquired distribution rights for Latin America and The Mediapro Studio Distribution for the rest of the world.