To explain the ending of Maledictions is, given its length, to essentially explain the whole thing. Daniel Burman’s neat little political thriller is akin to a feature film divided into three parts, though it’s the middle chapter, a crucial flashback explaining the real relationship between Argentine provincial governor Fernando Rovira and his right-hand man, Roman Sabate, that defines the story.
We’ll get to that. But there’s plenty more to unpack, since the present-day storyline is a nest of secret agendas and political schemes with relevant themes of resource exploitation and corruption. How the story concludes cannot, in this case, be isolated from how it began, since everything’s intimately connected in ways both political and personal. So, let’s do what we can to strip it down to its barest essentials, much like Burman did with the story itself.
The Lithium Agenda
The element of the day is lithium. Governor Rovira wants to block a bill that will protect local water bodies, since a tremendous amount of water is required in the extraction of natural lithium, which is a lucrative endeavour that he and several influential corporate partners would like to indulge in. The official line of Rovira’s party, Pragma, is that the money made through the lithium mining would ultimately trickle down into the local economy in the form of crucial infrastructure, but the left-wing position is that many poor local people will be displaced in the process.
Rovira’s efforts to block the bill are corrupt but nonetheless going well, at least until Román throws a spanner in the works by kidnapping Rovira’s daughter, Zoe, and begins collaborating with Facundo Semenchuk to collect votes in the bill’s favour. This initially seems like a simple moral opposition, but there turns out to be a much more personal reason for the intervention.
A Hell Of A Favour
The flashback episode reveals a crucial detail about Zoe – she’s not Rovira’s biological daughter. Rovira and his then-wife, Lucrecia, were unable to conceive a child of their own since Rovira was infertile, and instead they hatched a scheme to get Lucrecia pregnant through another man, headhunted by the pair of them. That man turned out to be Román.
Román was supposed to be Rovira’s political understudy, so being asked to climb into bed with his saucy wife was an unexpected development that he initially rejected. But, and this is crucial, Román felt indebted to Rovira thanks to his being instrumental in his mother’s recovery after an accident. So, even though Rovira was clear that whatever Román chose wouldn’t affect their working relationship, he nonetheless felt obligated to do his boss a solid and get his wife up the duff. Thus, Zoe.
The Kidnapping Motive
For 12 years after this event, Román continued working with Rovira, seemingly without issue. Zoe supposedly didn’t know the truth about her parentage, though it’s revealed that she did, since Lucrecia told her before she was mysteriously killed in a robbery in which, suspiciously, nothing was stolen. This is important too, since it’s at least partially what clues Román in on what Rovira and his crazy mother, Irene, might be capable of. And that includes his mother’s accident.
Irene’s whole thing is that she has devoted her life to her son’s political career and cares about it at the expense of everything else. She expects him to do the same, so having his wife bumped off for telling Zoe about Román, which could ultimately threaten Rovira’s political station, just seems like the coldly logical thing to do.
This, and the truth about what Rovira had planned for the local people of the province through his mining operations, all compelled Román to take matters into his own hands and kidnap Zoe in the hope of forcing Rovira to allow the bill to go through. In this, he was aided by Capardi, who revealed all of the hidden secrets about his mother and Rovira’s operations to push Román into causing carnage, all as part of a long con to ultimately keep Rovira on strings.
Capardi’s Play
Using Román as a pawn to prove to Rovira that he can be harmed, Capardi uses the whole situation as leverage over Rovira to convince him to allow the water bill to pass in exchange for being part of a coalition government on the way to the presidency – Rovira’s ultimate long-term ambition.
This does leave Irene looking a little stupid, though. She tries to force Román to back down by having Zoe reverse-kidnapped, believing that he’ll do anything to protect her. And she’s right – but her own callousness proves her undoing. In leaving Zoe behind with Román she proves to Rovira that she only cares about his function as a politician and not as a human being; he even considers smothering her with a pillow after discovering this information, but can’t bring himself to do it.
In a final act of spite, though, he tanks the lithium deal and goes public about Zoe’s parentage. Irene is furious about this, but it also frees him from the potential jeopardy of his political rivals being able to get to her. After everything, Rovira’s path to the presidency is relatively clear. Even if he makes it, though, everything that he has sacrificed to get there will weigh heavily on his achievement. Having said that, though, I don’t think he’s the type to mind.
