For a series that’s about a woman deciding to up and hoof it at the very last minute from her fancy-pants, high-society wedding, Un cuento perfecto (A Perfect Story) (2023) gets off to a very plodding kind of start. The whole thing, which charts the ensuing opposites-attract romance between the almost-bride and a more working-class, recently dumped dreamer, could use more backstory, less fiddling with timelines, and a bit more spark in the chemistry. But don’t get me wrong, I still watched the heck out of this steamy, scenic, Spanish series about the importance of finding your true self and living without worrying about what other people think.
Margarita Ortega Ortiz de Zárate (Anna Castillo)—Margot to everyone who cares—a hotel heiress dedicated to her work, is engaged to Filippo (Mario Ermito), a Genetically Blessed presumptively perfect man. When we first meet her she’s dealing with her feelings of anxiety and panic by baking magdalenas in the middle of the night because it gives her some semblance of control. But, the next morning in the backseat of her chauffeured car, just as she’s about to take a bite of one, her mother swoops in to grab it, citing concerns about her weight. Charming. Her mother also thinks Margot should go shopping instead of working, because she has her engagement party that night, which, contrary to Margot’s wishes, will be large and lush. Margot, however, very much wants to present her ideas for modernizing the hotel brand’s image, which her boss could care less about hearing. And then, instead, he asks her to bring all the other men at the table water. You know, since she’s up anyway.
At the engagement party, Margot hides in the kitchen to avoid the crush of people, half of whom she doesn’t even know, until her sisters Candela (Ingrid García Jonsson) and Patricia (Lourdes Hernández) gently pry her out. She runs the gauntlet of people telling her how lucky she is to be marrying Filippo, and we watch as she grows more and more panicked until Filippo pulls her away from the madding crowd. And then it is her wedding day and her mother, who the sisters call “Lady Meow ” because of all her plastic surgeries, is tsking because she thinks Margot could be thinner and admonishing her not to sweat. And Margot is finding it harder and harder to breathe. Filippo comes in and tells her it will all be just fine if she focuses on him and they have to proceed because there are more than 200 people out there. They all leave her alone for a bit to calm down, but instead she laces up her sneakers, climbs out the windows, hops in a golf cart, and whizzes on out of there.
Meanwhile, David (Álvaro Mel), who is heir to nothing, works three jobs—a bartender, a florist, and a babysitter—and dates a woman named Idoia (Lydia Pavon) whom he seems to idolize, mostly, as far as I can gather, for her looks. He meets up with Idoia in the afternoon before a much rescheduled dinner with his friends Domi (Tai Fati) and Iván (Jimmy Castro), who are also his roommates since he sleeps on their couch and takes care of their infant daughter, but she insists she can’t make the dinner (again) and he should have reminded her earlier in the day, not just the day before. Later, when he shows up for dinner without Idoia, Domi talks to him about how he needs to have a balanced relationship with boundaries, and Domi is very correct. But, before he can tell Idoia any of this, she dumps him. She tells him he’s too immature, constantly needs reassurance, and only lives in the short-term. David assures her he can change, while drinking a beer he doesn’t really want that he just ordered so he wouldn’t look childish by drinking the chocolate shake that he really did want.
None of this is told in quite so straightforward a manner as I’m telling it here, which isn’t all bad. The scenes of David walking out of the café after Idoia breaks up with him and Margot running away from her wedding are knit together so that they are joined, in some sense, before we actually see them meet. At the same time, though, I felt like I could have used just a smidge more background on both these characters. Well, especially on Margot. You get this vague nebulous sense of her mother being an overbearing ass, her family being uber wealthy, her job being unfulfilling, her fiancé being perhaps part of that too perfect life that makes her feel strangled, but it’s more a very rough (partially erased) sketch than a carefully drawn study.
Filippo decides to go back to Italy for a couple of months to think about what he wants, and Margot tries to go back to work like nothing has happened. However, the press has been having a field day with the news of her fleeing her own nuptials and so the company puts her on mandated leave by the board of older men. How lovely. David, meanwhile, is CONVINCED that Idoia is the love of his life and must get her back. Iván wins all of my respect when he says that “it’s, like, really crazy that you listen to reggaeton every night and don’t get the message.” When David asks what message, Iván responds, “That’s not love, dude. What you’re feeling is obsession-ion-ion!” David insists that he can just change who he is for Idoia and Iván insists that he absolutely should not. Growing and adapting with the person you’re in love with is appropriate and fair, but they should fundamentally like who you are to begin with, which Idoia clearly doesn’t, since she called him immature and mediocre. I would like to bottle Iván and sprinkle him liberally over all the men in other series and movies.
Margot and David finally meet when her sisters drag her out for an evening and they end up at the bar where he works. He immediately recognizes the sadness in her eyes, and also slyly serves her water when she doesn’t want to do the round of shots her sister is insisting upon. When her sister Patricia drunkenly drops her phone at the end of the night, David picks it up, and Margot comes to retrieve it the next morning. Thinking that Patricia, Margot’s tall blonde sister, will come to get the phone, David has also asked Idoia to meet him there, hoping to make her jealous. But, seeing what he’s trying to do, Margot deftly steps into the role of fake girlfriend. She makes up a story on the spot about going out to dinner and having an upcoming trip to Greece. So, thus begins their relationship, which they swear up and down is a brutally honest friendship designed to help the other eventually feel like they’re good enough to recuperate their lost love. And famouser last words have never been spoken. This is when the chemistry between them starts to build, which is fun to watch, but also when the show starts to play a bit with time. Sometimes, it will show one of them saying something and then the sounds will distort slightly and it will repeat the part again with what they really said. The distinction between the two could be clearer—though, perhaps the point is that reality is blurry?
Margot, of course, avoids telling David who she really is in terms of wealth, status, or being a hotel heiress. Even when, feeling like the fates have put them together, she invites him to actually go with her to Greece and they stay in her family’s chain of five-star hotels, she manages to side-step ever revealing that side of her herself by using her mother’s last name and avoiding his questions about what her work entails. At first, neither of them is willing to admit anything about their growing feelings for the other, insisting that they’re only in it for the self-improvement advice that will help them win back the people they’ve lost. I struggled some with the long list of advice that David had for Margot, much of which was about freeing herself—swimming naked in the ocean and things like that—while hers for him mostly entailed being so daring as to, and I don’t mean to include spoilers, wear a white button-down shirt. I mean, one of those is very much not like the other, especially when it’s a man telling a woman about how it will be an experience that changes and liberates her for the better. I think we can all agree that men and women experience public nudity in incredibly different ways, and what may be freeing and empowering for one might not be for the other. Plus, I get slightly creeped out by a man telling a woman what to do with her body. Period. Even if the words were written by women.
Anyway, most of the time is taken up by these two in Greece, thinking they have a slick plan of how to be together, but also not be together. They swear up and down they’re being honest, but we have the slippery timeline to let us know that they are, in fact, lying about their true feelings for each other. And Margot is still not being at all honest about her background. These things are bothersome and make the show hard to follow at times, especially since it’s only five episodes long, but the longer David and Margot are together the stronger their passion burns and the less I cared about mundane things like how well the narrative hung together. Okay, that’s not entirely true. The end of the series has two alternate endings, and I have never had a strong affection for choose-your-own-adventure type stories. Actual life has enough choices and decisions to make. In the end this story is far from perfect, but still caught me up enough in the lives and desires of its leads that I was glad I coasted along with them until the end. Or, at least one of the ends.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 
I loved this so much!!
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