Stories about missing children are often played as thrillers. But ones that are based on true events definitely feel more personal and emotional. Such is the case with a new Mexican drama, based on an autobiographical novel by Tamara Trottner.
Opening Shot: A man has his two young kids by the hand as he leads them out of their home and loads them into a waiting car.
The Gist: Leo Saltzman (Emiliano Zurita) is not taking his son Isaac (Alexander Varela Pavlov) and daughter Tamara (Marion Sirot) to school; he’s taking them to the Mexico City airport so they can fly to Paris. Leo is taking them away from their mother Valeria Goldberg (Tessa Ia), at the insistence of his wealthy and influential father Samuel (Juan Manuel Bernal), because “the kids will be better off far from here.”
As Leo gets the kids on the plane, telling them that their mother will join them soon, Valeria comes home from her trip, wondering where Leo and her kids are. When she sees that all three of their passports are gone, she realizes that he took them. She drives to her in-laws and demands to know where he took them. Samuel coldly tells her, from the other side of his front gate, “You know very well why this is happening,” and tells her she’ll never see them again.
“Paris, 1964.” Leo, Isaac and Tamara have landed in the city, and have found temporary refuge at the apartment of one of Leo’s friends. He continues to tell his kids that their mother will join them, but the longer he lies to them, the worse he feels. Eventually, he enrolls them in a new school, which is when they realize Valeria isn’t coming. When he talks to the headmaster, he tells her that Valeria has just returned from a stay in a psychiatric hospital, and he feared for the kids’ safety.
As we see in a flashback to Leo and Valeria’s wedding, their union wasn’t one of love, it was more of a business deal between two of Mexico City’s most prominent Jewish families. Leo, who wanted to be an architect, can’t help but follow Samuel’s plan for his life, despite being a fully grown man. But there never seemed to be any happiness between them.
Back to Mexico in 1964, Valeria’s father Moishe (Flavio Medina) hires a former Mossad agent to track down where Leo and the kids went. When he finds out it’s Paris, Valeria insists she goes with him.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Written by Maria Camila Arias and based on the novel of the same name by Tamara Trottner, No One Saw Us Leave brings to mind other thrillers like The Stolen Girl, where a mom tries to find her kidnapped daughter.
Our Take: There is a lot about the story of No One Saw Us Leave that’s incredibly sad to watch. Even though we don’t get a real picture of the incident or incidents that prompted Leo to take his children away from Valeria, what we do know is that their marriage was a cynical ploy by their two families to consolidate power. So seeing flashbacks of these two people who don’t belong together slog through this marriage and trying to parent these children might be tough to watch for anyone who has gone through it.
We suspect we’re going to see a fair number of flashbacks that not only detail the couple’s terrible marriage, but will reveal the events that set up the kidnapping. There definitely is something amiss, but it might not be what Leo told the kids’ headmaster it was. It may also have something to do with the close relationship between Valeria and her brother-in-law Carlos (Gustavo Bassani). But we get the feeling we won’t get even close to the entire truth until we get further down the line in the story.
What we also hope to see is just how influential both Valeria’s and Leo’s fathers are in this whole story. It seems that Leo can’t really help but kowtow to his father Samuel on pretty much everything in his life, and we wonder how things came to be like that. Valeria seems to be the stronger of the two, as we see when she basically defies her father Moishe at every turn, continually telling her not to get involved in the search but forging forward, anyway.
All of that context is really important, because without it, all the story consists of is Valeria chasing Leo and her kids around Europe and/or fighting Leo’s family back in Mexico. This story is more human than being just a thriller about kidnapped children, and we want to see the entire story of how it got to the point where Leo takes them to Europe.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Valeria and the Mossad agent manage to find the school where Leo enrolled this kids, but she watches helplessly as he puts her children in a car sent by Samuel and drives off with them.
Sleeper Star: Juan Manuel Bernal is pretty damned cold as Samuel. He also seems to have no compunction about verbally abusing Leo at his own wedding.
Most Pilot-y Line: Leo and Valeria sit down at their wedding reception and tell each other they don’t want to dance, and of course the crowd picks both of them up in order to do the Hora.
Our Call: STREAM IT.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.