The monsters that eat Miguel Bosé from the inside

Franz Kafka has already made it quite clear that relationships between father and son can be difficult, populate life with ghosts and arouse many traumas. In a quote from his famous letter to father, the Czech author snaps at his father: “You can only treat a child in the same way you are made, with force, noise and anger, and this also seemed very appropriate to you.” The phrase seems convenient to summarize the relationship of the Spanish singer Miguel Bose and the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguinhis father, according to what emerges from the first episodes of the series Bose, which narrates the turbulent life of the musician and which opens this Thursday in the countries where Paramount+ is available (in Spain, there is still no fixed broadcast date). It’s about a biopic that tries to show an undisguised portrait of one of the most successful and controversial Spanish singer-songwriters of the end of the last century and that, as stated in the drama, is full of “monsters” that “eat him from the inside”.

It may be that his father is precisely one of those demons. Dominguín shows a portrait of an Iberian male, full of himself, authoritarian and womanizer, who tries to dominate his son as he did with the 3,000 fighting bulls that he defeated in his bullfights. But the Bosé bull is too intrepid. In a scene from the series, Dominguín tries to flirt with a girlfriend of his son at the ranch that the bullfighter proudly runs in Spain. When Bosé finds her crying, he demands an explanation from her father. “A bullfighter never apologizes. Are you and I going to argue now over a woman?” the matador blurts out. We are in Spain at the end of the 1970s, with the Franco dictatorship recently fallen and with a youth willing to break all the chains. To the life of suit, business and meetings with whiskeys that his father offers him, Bosé puts art, music, sex (with men and women), the search for love and his own freedom before him.

Miguel Bosé at the premiere event for the series about his life, Bosé (2022).Paramount+

The son is not there to put up with the excesses of the father, but neither is the manipulation of the mother, the Italian actress Lucia Bose, played by Valeria Solarino. As soon as he succeeds in his career, first as an actor and then in his beginnings as a singer, Miguel Bosé becomes the provider of the maternal home, signing checks to guarantee everything from mom’s luxuries until the boilers don’t fail, although she doesn’t want to know that the world does not collapse because the weight is carried by the shoulders of the son. But the relationship is not sweet either. “Don’t be a coward like your father!” She yells at him in one of the scenes of the series, while Miguel Bosé replies that he was never up to the task of raising him and his sister, who left them in the hands of the nanny, La Tata, perhaps the true maternal love of the singer. “If I have children, I don’t want them to bear my mistakes, as I bore yours,” says Bosé at the end of the discussion, in the garden of his mother’s house and while seeing a statue of his father dressed of a bullfighter There are monsters that are difficult to defeat.

Trauma aside, the series shows a young, sensitive and tender Bosé; modern and impetuous and cultured; very talented; ardent, passionate, infatuated, insatiable lover. A hurricane capable of turning his own life upside down. Or destroy others. As a young man he was beautiful, beautiful as a marble sculpture by Michelangelo, so it is not surprising that he drew sighs everywhere and many, men and women, wanted to put him in their beds: he slept with the actresses with whom he shared the set, his young dancers and even politicians, like the Italian Marco Pannella. A dissipated life that covered his paternal hair with gray hair. But what is life without setbacks, those that leave scars? A pretty Italian bride who loses the son they both conceived without planning it in an accident. The young producer, and fleeting love, who launches him into the world of music and who leaves him for a better job and with a broken heart. Or the young dancer, lover, dream partner, whom he must let go because many, many people depend on the young talent to keep pulling the cash register. To that lover, one morning after love, Bosé teaches him for the first time the lyrics of I will love you, one of his great ballads. Saying goodbye to him, the author laments: “Like so many times in life, my career separates me from love.”

José Pastor plays Miguel Bosé in his younger years.
José Pastor plays Miguel Bosé in his younger years.Cecilia Bayonne

That sensitive and intimate Bosé contrasts with the person who in recent years has made headlines in the press around the world. If we go back to Kafka, it seems that we see a modern version, although just as grotesque, of Gregorio Samsa: a man turned overnight into a repellent bug. The Bose that creates a whole network to evade taxes in Spainwhich deducts personal expenses —among them, the purchase of acorn-fed Iberian hams and loins— and becomes due to the Spanish Treasury more than two million dollars (1.8 million euros); the Bosé who moves to Mexico and enters through the back door, like a real bandit, for being included in a black list of defaulters; the bose that appears in the calls pandora papers as a shareholder of a company in Panama linked to a Swiss bank; or Bose who launched nonsense about the covid-19 pandemic and became an anti-vaccine spokesperson. Of the covid, he said that an elite created the coronavirus as an excuse to vaccinate the world population and thus be able to implant all of humanity with “microchips or nanobots for the sole purpose of controlling it.”

José Pastor in his role as Miguel Bosé, at the center of the stage.
José Pastor in his role as Miguel Bosé, at the center of the stage.Paramount+

Scandals that have surely made more than one follower of the singer raise an eyebrow of censorship, but that do not erase the passion that the interpreter of my brunette. And it is certain that those who are passionate about Bosé will follow the series with ardor. Although at first the deployment of dates and cities in the first minutes is tiresome, it is a friendly biography with the viewer, with a good performance by its actors (José Pastor and Iván Sánchez play Miguel Bosé at different times in his life ) and that tries to present him as just another mortal despite his fame with his setbacks, successes, passions, nonsense and, of course, the monsters that eat him up.

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The monsters that eat Miguel Bosé from the inside