Javier Giner’s autobiographical novel, ‘Yo adicto’, came out 3 years ago, but it has circulated so much in certain circles that it seems like it was yesterday. Both a part of the LGTBIQ+ community – especially the gay one, in this case – and those with problems with alcohol and other drugs were reflected in the main character. Because almost no one talks about it, but at certain times it is difficult to establish a conversation on certain social networks with someone who is not drunk or high, the book was an absolute success, so a television adaptation was soon announced. After all, if Giner was known for anything, it was not for his literary work, but for his videos, his first audiovisual steps, and his work as press officer for Almodóvar or Penélope Cruz.
Disney+ has hosted the 6-episode series, far from the aesthetic mandates of El Deseo: this is not a pop, aesthetic series, nor overloaded with songs. There is a notable scene with a song by Manel (which we would now classify as very ‘Saltburn’), but much more striking is the enormous number of books that appear in shot. Something that may be very Almodóvar, but not the characteristic that most defines him.
Giner has written the script and co-directed the project with Elena Trapé, something closer to social cinema, but without nonsense or moral burdens. Above all, he has respected the story of his life, only allowing certain licenses, so that a 500-page book flows with agility and without the slavery of sticking to each fact. Some details of the book do not appear in the series and other elements are added that were not in the original work, but the essence is the same: that of finding ourselves to get ourselves out of the hole.
The author does not hide behind nicknames or another absurd exercise in autofiction that no one asked for, and he has named his protagonist Javier Giner. The actor Oriol Pla, whom surprisingly I had not previously met, has done an enormous job in his mimesis, turning out, like him, unbearable and snobbish in the first instance, and tender and huggable in the second half. And, as is emphasized in a moment in ‘I Addict’, this is not a story of good or bad, but rather we all have a little of both things inside us.
The story of ‘Yo Addict’ is that of a young man in his thirties who voluntarily enters a detoxification center, first on a Sunday basis, then under more dramatic conditions. His life is not the most gruesome, he does not have a childhood of abandonment and abuse, he has not suffered the worst bullying, nor is he the worst loose cannon that appears in the series, and yet he carries a series of traumas that have pushed him first to drink, then to take drugs, and then to have compulsive sex, endangering his integrity.
The great point that the series makes is that as the plot progresses it stops talking about addictions and begins to analyze the reasons that push us to them. Issues such as “chemsex” or chills are not avoided, and that is what the episode with Omar Ayuso is for, who has been hyping the series for 2 years and then appears for only a few minutes, but that is not the crux of the matter. Because addiction is the symptom, and never the disease, Giner and Trapé take out the scalpel to delve into the depths of the things that have hurt us, those seemingly harmless details or comments that made the home a completely unbreathable place. That’s why chapter 5, titled ‘The Family’, is so devastating. After him, the last one, much shorter than usual, simply tastes like a nice epilogue.
An immense Ramón Barea as an impassive father who throws darts that open incurable wounds, like someone who doesn’t want it, endures the downpour of Oriol Pla in what could be the scene of his life. The one where he vomits out all the things that are never said out loud. There we will no longer be talking about G or glasses of wine, but about parents who did not give us the physical affection we needed, nor their approval, who unconsciously sowed the seeds of evil in us for the apartments we had to buy and the jobs. that we had to achieve. ‘Yo Addict’ is such a hard series because it doesn’t talk about distant things, about a half-posh drug addict who spent just 4 months in a detox center, but about the depths of what he experienced in what had to be a safe place and was. in its place an inexhaustible source of suffering. This is not the portrait of a strange, especially dysfunctional family to point the finger at. It is its absolute normality that hurts so much to contemplate.
