Los Guapos

Synopsis

Los Guapos is the story of a reunion. Nuria and Pablo grew up in the same working-class and marginal neighbourhood. However, their lives have taken different paths. Pablo is a lawyer specialising in charitable causes and it has been a long time since he set foot on the streets of the neighbourhood where they grew up. Nuria, on the other hand, has been stuck in time, without many options or opportunities. After years of knowing nothing about one another, Nuria contacts her old friend to help her with a legal matter. This rapprochement will force them to confront their own lives and review their shared past.

Writer and director’s note

Memory is often an exercise in which fantasy fills in the gaps, the shortcomings, the cowardice. 

In the case of Los Guapos, two characters embody two different versions of destiny. Pablo and Nuria grew up in the same neighbourhood, but their lives have evolved very differently. When she tracks him down and asks for his help, he cannot refuse. And he cannot refuse precisely because he feels that there is something that binds him to her, that makes them a kind of reflection of one another.

The reunion will help them listen to each other, to understand the differences that led them to drift apart for good. The innocent and failed love story they experienced in their early adolescence also provides them with a space of intimacy where the mismatches in their stories are also expressed.

The title Los Guapos refers to the fragility of someone who was once desired. Nuria never lived up to expectations because she was probably someone on whom others projected their own fantasies. Something Pablo did with her too. Thus, when confronted with her again, he cannot help but feel a deep sense of guilt.

In a play with only two characters, we try to bring in the whole human landscape of an poor neighbourhood. Parents, siblings, the environment, everyone’s destiny intersecting with their own. No one is entirely responsible for his or her own successes or failures, but shares something with outside influences, chance, context. We want to look at this in Los guapos.

David Trueba