Carolina Yuste and Camila Sodi star in this series about two Kellys who are ambushed while cleaning the house of a wealthy family in the area.
The scene is extremely chaotic. Desi and Cata, two exhausted and seriously injured young women, trek through the Fun West of El Campello, in Alicante, an area that mimics the American West and normally serves as a backdrop for bachelorette parties or paintball matches. Ignorant of our protagonists, hundreds of people have fun in what appears to be the square of this town of papier-mâché, brandishing their toy guns, in full-throated costumes, horses and specialists performing the capers that have been seen a thousand times in the genre films .
“We’re cutting!” calls one of the operators. The scene, shot on a particularly hot February 14, will appear in “Without footprints,” the new fiction with a Spanish label that will premiere Prime Video in 2023. Carolina Yuste and Camila Sodi are Desi and Cata. One gypsy, the other Mexican, both are friends, share a flat and work as a housekeeper. But one fine day they are fired and given the worst job: cleaning the house of one of the richest families in Alicante.
There they realize that they have been ambushed and involved in a murder. “They want to do them in brown because they are absolutely invisible women to society and they are perfect for eating it,” said Yuste (Badajoz, age 30) after the sequence they just shot. The winner of a Goya for Best Supporting Actress for ‘Carmen y Lola’ assures that in addition to the action, comedy or thriller in which fiction is framed, her fascination is ‘this story behind the story’.
At his side, Sodi (Mexico City, age 36) is experiencing his first recordings on this side of the pond. “I wanted to move to Spain -he says- and this proposal came out of nowhere, one of those magical things in the universe. A casting for a series that started shooting in Alicante within two months. It was a clear signal.”
Running the test thousands of miles away was not easy. “We did it through Zoom and the internet started to go wrong. Carolina was already selected and gave me the answer, but I was left with the frozen image… It was a disaster,” he recalls. The team must have seen something, because Sodi soon got the news that his role “I moved to Spain with my whole family and I’m very excited. Of course I gained about five kilos with so many hams, croquettes and Russian salads,” he says with amusement.
There is no avoiding that there are at least initial similarities with ‘Red Sky’, the series that premiered in March 2021 and which dealt with the spectacular escape of three prostitutes from a hostess club. Criticized for hypersexualizing the protagonists and romanticizing prostitution, nothing in the ‘No Traces’ tone resembles Netflix fiction. “That vision was very important to me. There have been four people directing and there had to be, yes or yes, parity. On the other hand, they are two normal women, not the masculine idea projected on what two women are like. It’s very difficult to see series starring women in which they are not sexualized in some way,” Yuste said.
Sodi confirms her partner’s words with an example: “We do not use make-up throughout the series, but not a drop. They put a little bit to unify, if there is a pimple or an imperfection, but there is no lipstick or mascara. There’s also a sense that they’re not physically trying to be attractive to anyone. They’re just people having an experience.”
And while Sara Antuña, with a laugh, warns that an actress should never be believed if she says she’s not wearing makeup, the series’ producer and showrunner, along with Carlos de Pando, admits that “Without Traces” “has nothing to do with it.” see”, beyond the fact that two women star in the fiction. “‘Red Sky’ wanted to be a constant third act, a frenetic thing with video game protagonists, with an aesthetic of powerful heroines with a gun; Cata and Desi are two friends who can’t wait to get home, take off their shoes, take a shower, and take two ibuprofen and a coke. They have no desire whatsoever to be heroines,” he says.
In fact, De Pando says one of the things that was clear from the start is that they would avoid the word ‘epic’ and the typical ‘Armagagedon’ shot, with slow motion and the characters moving forward, “but not because it’s wrong, but because we were looking for a different, more authentic tone. De Pando says that was the hardest part, finding the tone. Because the series mixes thriller, action, drama and comedy,” and all of that leads you sometimes to ordinary places.” The solution? “Put everything through the filter of the truth, that we believe what happens to them,” he replies.
Behind the eight chapters are eight hands, those of Paco Caballero, Samantha López, Koldo Serra and Gemma Ferraté. Each of them has been in charge of two chapters. You may wonder if it has been difficult to unite the styles to give coherence to the result. “I think everything was written very well, it was already done,” explains López. Serra, for his part, indicates that there is “a superior father”, namely Paco Caballero, who “sets the tone and the language” with the first episode. But he emphasizes, in the faint voice of the desert dust, that the editors and directors of photography are the same for all chapters.
That tone is that of a modern western. Among the team’s more or less personal jokes, they even call the production a “paella western”. Paella of course because of the fact that it was shot in Alicante, but also because of the mishmash of genres, and western not only because of the desert landscapes, the wind and the gorges, but “because there is also something very small people face very large ones”. Moreover, Antuña laughs, “which allowed us to make a joke while promoting corruption, like paella which is there all over Spain, but like in Valencia, nowhere.”
That idea of the modern western is very present in the formal code of fiction, “with very long shots, sometimes contemplative, shot in ‘scope’ to search for the type of framing of the spaghetti western”, let a Serra leave Madrid elated: « It is a joy to photograph in Alicante. I see the series shot in Madrid and it’s always the same damn locations. You come to Alicante and everything is new, virgin, and that makes the series richer».
Source: La Verdad
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