Ana de Nadi: Colombian telenovela that celebrates the eroticism of fifty

It’s a quiet morning and Ana Ocampo is in for a tense staring contest with a device: she looks carefully at the cell phone of her husband, Horacio Valenzuela, an abandoned object in the main room of the Bogota mansion where they live. Ana is 50 with three children and suspects that Horacio is an architect to whom she has been married for 25 years, He is not sincere. The phone can confirm or not confirm if your marriage is in crisis. A friend, Genoveva, tells her that she would rather not know about such a thing as long as her husband does not decide to go with his lover. Another friend, Violetta, considers leaving a man who doesn’t value her essential. Anna could no longer suspect: anxiety had caused her to burn some lentils on Sunday, which had never happened since she decided to devote herself exclusively to her home. Finally, he takes the device and writes the key to confirm or not confirm his suspicions. But it failed. Her husband changed the code or she does not remember it. panic. The truth is so close and so far at the same time.

Little does Ana know that this is one of the first scenes of Colombia’s most watched telenovela, Ann nobodyWhere is the hero. And yes, her husband has a lover of two years, that’s what this show is about infidelity and a 50-year-old woman who must rebuild her life to understand that she has no other name, no one else. The TV series about the horns was even better evaluation That Colombia’s news and reality shows, and more recently the television broadcasting platform Televisa and Univisión, are called FixAnd He reached an agreement with RCN’s channel To be able to broadcast it in the United States and the rest of Latin America. Most of the audience, for their part, don’t know this novel is it remake for ‘Lady Isabella: a Colombian TV movie that was already a landmark in Latin America in the early 1990s.

“Lady Isabella It was the first series-novel exported from Colombia, widely, throughout Latin America, says Ana de Nadi’s co-writer Jimena Romero, whose father Bernardo Romero was a screenwriter. Lady Isabella. His daughter’s flick on this 1993 vintage hit is in the 21st century.

Colombia has been an exporter of novels ever since Ugly Betty a Perfumed coffee for womenJimena Romero says so Lady Isabella She was a pioneer among them, and turned her father into a popular Latin American television writer. “When my father and mother traveled to Venezuela, they were greeted as if the Beatles had arrived,” he recalled. His mother, Judy Henriquez, was a star Lady Isabella. In addition to being broadcast in countries like Venezuela, Mexico has modified it as woman’s look y If they let usPortugal submitted a version entitled Don’t say goodbyeand Telemundo made a North American version called Victoria.

Ann nobody, produced this year by RCN, has been adapted to current feminist concerns. Friend Violetta, for example, was in the original version a 50-year-old woman with many lovers who died of AIDS. In the new version, on the other hand, she has the same lovers but she does not die but appears as a woman empowered by Sex and the City. “The original version stated that promiscuity must be punished,” says Romero angrily, who has managed to save Violetta from disgrace this time. In the new edition, on the other hand, sexuality is celebrated in women who are 50 years of age or older. “Thirty years ago, 50-year-old women weren’t seen as sexy, and in this version I wanted the opposite: We want Ana to feel sexually satisfied,” says Romero, who is also 52.

In fact, you think this is in large part the reason why Lady Isabella y Ann nobody They were very successful: the protagonist is an older woman who is not even twenty. The public reaction was overwhelming Lady Isabella Because it was the first TV series in the history of soap operas, including all Mexican soap operas, that the protagonist was 50 years old and not 21 years old, ”says Romero. Lady Isabella The ingenious thing was to say that the 50-year-old protagonist still has the right to romance. in Ann nobody He has the right to romance but also to eroticism.

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Although three decades have passed, Romero has seen how that message, that of the older woman who has lost her identity and is trying to regain it, still reverberates among viewers. “I’ve never had the opportunity to perceive in real time what the audience is feeling, and on the networks you can see right away that the vast majority of comments are from women who have gone through something similar, or who write: ‘I seem to be listening to my mother.'”

Anna needs a reminder about her missing identity. In the words of the screenwriter, “One gets an epiphany when one goes through a little bit of pain. If Ana hadn’t noticed the cut, she wouldn’t remember who she was and how she left herself. That’s why I had to see the cell phone. But she also had to meet Joaquín, the young journalist who crossed her heart on the path to independence.”

“The 50-year-old is so sexy because she knows from experience what she wants and how to ask for it,” the reporter told her. By the way, Anna is played by Paula Turbay, the famous 52-year-old actress who was a finalist for Miss Universe in 1992. “A 50-year-old woman is just beginning to write the rest of her story,” he adds in a short monologue about his new love. On Tuesday the 25th, the day of the final, it will be known whether Ana and Joaquín will end up together or not. Whatever happens, Anna still does not belong to anyone. Neither her ex nor her new boyfriend and her life is more than her partner’s.

“Do you know that I don’t blame you?” Ana asks Horacio’s mistress, Adelaide, at one point. “On the contrary, I think you have helped me speed up this process. One day I realized that my happiness was subordinated to Horacio’s, and I had forgotten what made me truly happy, and so far I only remember it.”

For those who worked in Ann nobodyNo one is the bad guy in this series, and this is another secret ingredient in this series. Not Adelaide, the mistress, the young woman who also learns the hard way about her identity. Nor Horacio, the unfaithful husband, according to Jorge Enrique Abello, the actor who plays him and who is best known for being Don Armando in Ugly Betty.

“The antagonist here is a human,” Abello says. “Horacio is not the bad guy, but he is a man with outdated morals, a man who builds emotional relationships by invalidating the other, someone who has values ​​from the past where winning was the most important thing and not togetherness. This is also why Horacio is someone who suffers so badly, because in the present he doesn’t understand what is happening,” he adds.

Will classify Abello, as Romero Ann nobody Like a telenovela with a feminist approach but they make a clarification: one in which empowering Ana does not mean showing others, like Horacio, black and white. “Feminists have worked so hard for an egalitarian world, but what’s also happened is a phenomenon of cancellation when you meet your opponent: You don’t have to talk about or with the enemy, and it’s very exclusive,” Abello says. He concludes, “Here even when you see photography, theatre, light, the series wants to see naked people, human beings, not just black and white tones.”

Ann nobody It doesn’t start out, like many series, with one woman who will find Prince Charming. This queen has already married her lover and realizes that the castle is more corrupt than she expected. Ann nobody It is best for those who want to see the truth on a cell phone: There is no prince, there is no castle, there is no bad guy, there is no bad guy, and there is no queen. There is only Anna and no one else.

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