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Ghosts are also inherited

2021-04-06T03:50:44.013Z


A British series recounts the coexistence of various spirits with the owner of the mansion where they reside


When an arrow pierced the neck of Pat, a charming camp instructor in the middle of archery class, he didn't know it was going to make him the umpteenth ghost of Button Mansion.

He could not even suspect, of course, that death is sometimes nothing more than an eternity sharing a flat - or a huge mansion - with a handful of ghosts from all possible eras - cavemen, peasant women who are supposed to be witches, poets who never got to publish a verse and deeply hated Lord Byron, captains of the army, aristocrats and even politicians with sex scandals in tow.

But it didn't take long to find out, and of course, to start organizing all kinds of activities in the old mansion.

Until his peaceful non-life turned into a hilarious nightmare after the last death in the Button family.

That because?

Because the deceased was not the last Button.

The latest Button is Alison Cooper — Charlotte Ritchie, as a sloppy

medium

— a young, unemployed, newlywed young woman who is just looking at a horrendous apartment that she may not even be able to afford when she receives the call.

He has not inherited a house but something so huge that if it had streets instead of corridors it could be a small town.

So why not turn it into a hotel and get rid of all its problems once and for all?

This is the starting point for

Fantasmas

(Movistar +), a kind of theatrical —the actors play at least two characters per head, without the spectator's eye being aware of it— —situation comedy so 90s that it may be familiar and that resurrects the endless comic possibilities of the spectrum.

It would seem that the series - comparable to the best chapters of the best

Doctor Who

or any good

Monty Python

sketch —

of the winner of more than one Bafta Tom Kingsley does not invent anything, but neither does he hide any of his cards.

In each of the first chapters of the first season there is at least one direct nod to a classic ghost.

There is the famous phrase “Who are you going to call?” From

Ghostbusters

,

even hammering the

medium

with horrendous songs, as in

Ghost

between Patrick Swayze and the wonderful Oda-Mae, Whoopi Goldberg.

But Kingsley and his people, although limited by space - the dead are trapped in the house but the living too, because they have nowhere else to go - manage to turn the relationship between the living and the dead into a tender post-

comedy

.

An image from the second season of 'Fantasmas'.

On the one hand, there is the matter that ghosts do not know how to enchant the house.

How do you enchant a house?

They need to do it to sink the hotel idea.

They do not want to have to share the mansion with

so much

alive.

But can the ghost do everything?

No, Kingsley's ghosts are powerfully human, in the most human of ways: they have infinite weaknesses.

Some are naive - like Pat and, above all, Kitty, almost a huge baby in a period dress, obsessed with knowing precisely how babies are made - others are vain - the moment when the politician, the only one capable from

touching

things ridiculously, making an inordinate effort, googling, it's television ghostly gold— ​​others are just insecure but bossy — like the army captain who fears he will be nothing if he stops giving orders.

On the one hand, there is the idea of ​​not being able to stop being who you were, even though it no longer matters what you have been, and that faced with a forced social situation, like the one you lived in high school, you occupy exactly the same place that you occupied - being the repellent, the deluded, the profiteer, the boss.

On the other, the idea of ​​oblivion that they avoid at the moment in which Alison — due to a spectacular non-accident — begins to be able to communicate with them.

You see them everywhere.

And at first it is horrible, but then, when he gets used to it, he has the feeling that he could no longer be without them, even though their care is similar to that of children who always want more.

And what do they want?

Know things.

The veiled reflection on the necessity of not turning one's back on the past, and at the same time, keeping in mind the pride that that past would feel in the future that awaited it is one of the most fascinating aspects of the series, whose second season is still to be concluded.

It is not that only Alison can discover things about the family of those who still have family, and in some way, make the dead feel alive again, but each of them was a world that disappeared but did not really do it and Like the vampires who teach 18th century life in

Alan Ball's

mythical

True Blood

,

here the ghosts in the basement, a town completely wiped out by the plague, could allow an archaeologist to know exactly what it was like. thing.

And of course there is the enormous generation gap - from the caves to 2021 - which, with a necessary and evasively therapeutic dose of humor today, saves itself time and again in the only way it can: by trying to understand the other. .

Because that is also and above all,

Ghosts

, to understand and accept the other, or how could he be able to live with someone for hundreds of years if not?

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-04-06

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