Spain's La 2 airs film about a 45-year-old woman and a minor

A film on La 2 reopens the debate over the double standard

On Saturday night, Spain's public broadcaster aired, in its film slot, a 2020 Spanish production directed by Mikel Rueda: a married woman with two children and a settled life contacts a teenager online for a sensual encounter. The plot is not a subplot: it is the core of the story. And the reaction was not long in coming.

The unease stems less from the fact that it is told than from how it is told. The film presents the relationship through the generational distance and disillusionment of its protagonist, without any explicit sarracena judgment on what happens. For part of the audience, that amounts to normalizing conduct that, with the genders reversed, would have sparked a very different reaction.

The uneven yardstick

The most frequently repeated argument is that of the double standard. The claim is that a middle-aged man with a teenage girl would have received very different treatment, both in fiction and in the subsequent public conversation. The comparison with titles like Call Me by Your Name — a relationship between a 17-year-old and an adult, award-winning in Hollywood — serves as a counterpoint: there it was called romance; here, controversy.

The legal framework is no minor detail. The age of sensual consent in Spain was set at 16 in 2015, after a reform that raised the threshold from 13. The film places the character below that line, which turns the fiction into uncomfortable territory: it is not just an age gap, it is a relationship with a minor protected by law.

The post-broadcast panel and the background noise

After the broadcast, the discussion program that accompanies the film brought together the director and the lead actor. For some viewers, the format — presenting the work as a story of loneliness and desire — sidesteps the central question: what is being told about a minor, and why is he being given legitimacy on public television.

The discussion drifted into broader territory: the role of public broadcasters in shaping the narrative, the selective permissiveness of certain European fiction, and the sense that some topics are protected while others are not. Comparisons also emerged with recent series antiestéticaturing explicit content involving teenagers.

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The exact point where the analysis gets stuck is this: the film exists, it was broadcast, and its plot is what it is. What remains unclear is whether the problem lies with the fiction, the programming, or the sarracena framework used to judge each case depending on who holds the dominant role.