Dare Venezuela's soap operas mix love and politics?

www.iht.com Juan Forero The New York Times Tuesday, February 18, 2003   CARACAS The story line is usually simple: poor girl meets rich man, falls in love and is in for madcap high jinks as parallel worlds collide. Or it is about a fiercely independent, successful woman who, following years of loneliness, finds love, loses love and then finds it again. This is the world of Venezuelan soap operas, the sappy, drippy daily dramas that captivate millions by sticking to a proven formula. For more than 40 years, it has worked - soap operas are as much an icon of Venezuela as oil and beauty queens. The telenovelas, as they are known, dominate nightly programming and rival their Mexican and Brazilian counterparts for their popularity overseas. However, with Venezuela in political tumult, coming off an economically devastating two-month anti-government strike, the scriptwriters of soaps like "My Fat Beauty" and "Intimate Underwear" are asking themselves whether they should not inject something new into the fables. It is not that love is going by the wayside. "Every telenovela is a story of love," a prominent program director said emphatically. But several leading scriptwriters are convinced that soaps need to reflect the reality of Venezuela, and that reality is a country roiled by protests and the daily rants of a pugnacious left-leaning president, Hugo Chavez, and his determined opponents. It is society so polarized that government backers refer to the upper classes as the "squalid ones" and the president's adversaries see his supporters as uncouth riff-raff. Leonardo Padron, a scriptwriter with the Venevision television station, sees delicious possibilities. He is the first who is planning to infuse his upcoming soap, "Sweet Thing," with a bit of up-to-date crumbling Venezuela. "As a writer, I am absolutely seduced by the idea of making a chronicle about what is happening," said Padron, who has made a string of successful soaps over 10 years. "I'm going to tell a story of love but in the context of what we are living," he continued. "I am going to try to create a cocktail that will have a dose of escapism, a dose of humor, but also a dose of reality." His work, though, will not be easy in a world in which television executives flinch at experiments. That is especially true now the Chavez, angry about anti-government news programs, is proposing restrictions on the media. So instead of Padron's initial idea - a poor girl from a pro-Chavez barrio falls in love with a "squalid one" - his tale will be largely metaphorical. The antagonist, he said, will be the president of a company who becomes intoxicated with power, a clear reference to Chavez. "Perhaps by the 15th show, people will say, 'That guy is just like Chavez,' but this will be without my saying that I am telling the story of the president," said Padron with a wry smile. Not everyone is convinced a new formula will work. Scripts must speak to the large masses of poor people, many of them Chavez supporters who might reject telenovelas with a political bent. Indeed, scriptwriters say the big question they face as they embark on writing 150-hour stories is whether viewers want more politics in a country infused with politics. "The conventional telenovela where the story is about love - that is what the people want to see, romance," said Arquimedes Rivero, a producer who has done as much as anyone to create the Venezuelan telenovela. "The people do not want discussion and conflict." Still, as the two main Telenovela studios here prepare to film a new string of soap operas this year, scriptwriters and producers are discussing ways of carefully incorporating the everyday into scripts that will remain heavy on love and betrayal, intrigue and jealousy. "It is inevitable," said Jose Simon Escalona, who oversees dramatic programming for Radio Caracas Television. "The telenovela looks to appeal to the masses, and to do that it has to explore the intimacies, how the people feel. We look to do telenovelas that talk to Venezuelans, that understand Venezuelans." Some scriptwriters said they would follow the old recipe, until Padron or others succeed with telenovelas that deal with the political. Perla Farias, a scriptwriter who is sticking to the basics, said: "I do not have anything finished just now, but it is going to be about love, a very complex love story."