La Otra Mirada, a Spanish TV production from 2018-2019, finally arrived in the U.S. via PBS and Amazon, under the title of The Boarding School. Set in an elite school for girls in 1920's Seville, the first season chronicles a year in which a false dawn of Feminism occurs among both adolescent students and female teachers within a traditional, paternalistic society.
The plot is driven by two events: The first is the assumption of Manuela, the young progressive director of the school to this position formerly held by her mother, its founder. The second is the arrival of Teresa, the enigmatic daughter of the murdered Spanish Ambassador to Lisbon. He leaves behind a cryptic note to her, with the name of one of the school's students on it, which sends her off on a quest to solve the mystery of his assassination.
As with so many TV series, the first season has several directors and writers, but they succeed in giving in-depth characterizations of both some students and faculty members over this fateful year in 13 episodes. Among the teachers, it focusses on Manuela and Teresa and two others, Angela and Luisa. Each has her own situation as women in a world still severely limited by tradition. Manuela, married to an influential lawyer, does not want children, and is in conflict both with rather her conventional husband, and her equally strong-minded mother. Angela with four sons and a caring stay-at-home husband, finds herself falling in love with a woman, an artist and the single mother with her daughter at the school. Luisa, a woman, remains mired in widowhood, supporting and exploited by her worthless son.
Teresa is the outlier--a sort of female knight-errant, who has spent her twenties estranged from her father, but with enough independent money so that she can travel the world by herself, and live as she wishes. She wears stylishly modern trousers, smokes cigars, and sleeps with whom she pleases. The school for her is a temporary landing place as a base for her investigations incognito. She and Manuela click when they meet, and Manuela offers her a teacher's job at the school. Over the course of the year, Teresa finds that she is a talented, if radical educator, and she and Manuela work to make their female charges begin to value themselves as individuals beyond the views of Seville's (and Spain's at the time--and beyond) men, who view women as breeders and sex objects, and attractive ornaments.
A group of the students receive equal focus. Most come from privileged backgrounds, and their parents seem to expect a sort of finishing school education to make them obedient wives. Unexpectedly they receive far more, learning how to cope with the usual problems of adolescence and the upheavals of puberty, the courage to speak up and dare to think of a future beyond simple matrimony (some of their teachers are, knowingly or unknowingly, experiencing this as working mothers and career women, in one of few the careers available at a time where they are able to do so). Several girls have far more difficult ordeals: one has a sister who dies suddenly, derailing her own ambitions. Another, the Roberta of the fatal note, is raped by her fiancé, the heir of the powerful Peralta family--and decides to accuse him in court.
Most of the men don't come off too well, except for Manuela's understanding father, and Ramón, the cute red-haired janitor--and the only proletarian character in the series. One Peralta brother goes through personal tragedy: Tomás, decides to support Roberta publicly at her trial, and is consequently disinherited by his family (he ends up as an assistant janitor at the school), and can never marry the girl student he loves. But men in Spain would have to undergo a lot in future decades, including a brutal war and repression for everyone before things would start to change.
I don't want to reveal any more details of the very complicated plot with the focus on so many characters and situations, but the writers and directors of the series do an amazing feat of keeping it all together, right to the season finale, where many things find solutions, but others do not, as in real life.
I understand that the second series was only eight episodes and had an indifferent critical reaction. I really don't want to see it.
Spanish women would go into a repressive eclipse with the triumph of the Franco regime in 1939 that would turn the clock back for nearly three decades. As I was growing up in postwar World War II America, the situation initially for girls and women was only marginally better (think Mad Men). But I, like them have passed through successive changes and have lived in both places (and was fortunate to be married for a while to a very free-thinking Spaniard too). Hopefully, all this won't cycle back.
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The first season is currently broadcast on PBS stations, with all episodes streaming on PBS passport, and also available on Amazon Prime.
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