‘Vidago Palace’ brings ‘Downton Abbey’-style drama to Portugal
The success of England’s “Downton Abbey” opened the door for other countries to try their hand at a period-piece TV series brimming with eye-catching costumes, classic cars, classdriven intrigue and star-crossed lovers buffeted by circumstance and fate. Australia (“A Place to Call Home”), Spain (“Gran Hotel”) and Mexico (“El Hotel de los Secretos,” a remake of “Gran Hotel”) had three of the more popular iterations. And now comes Portugal with the charmingly melodramatic six-part “Vidago Palace,” available for streaming through Acorn TV beginning Monday.
Set at the swanky Vidago Palace Hotel (a real-life resort in the northern Portugal town of Vidago) in the summer of 1936, as the Spanish Civil War raged next door and Hitler hosted the Olympics in Berlin, the production focuses on the romantic trials and tribulations of Carlota (Mikaela Lupu) and Pedro (David Seijo), lovers meant for each other but kept apart by family machinations and a rash decision to join that war raging in Spain.
He’s a waiter and the son of the concierge at Vidago Palace, she’s the daughter of the Count and Countess of Vimieiro who summer there and look askance at someone of his low station. They’re thrilled she is engaged to marry the controlling but monied Cesar da Silva (Pedro Barroso), a sneering, whip of a man who couldn’t look more like a silent-movie villain if he tried.
Meanwhile, Pedro has traded serving drinks for dodging bullets, having thrown his lot in with those fighting the fascist Francisco Franco in Spain. Still,
you just know these two crazy kids belong together.
Vidago Palace, though, is more than just a setting for romance. It’s also a way station of intrigue, filled with a motley crew of Europeans being inexorably pulled into the vortex of history, whether it’s Portuguese-Jewish jeweler Sam Cohen (Pedro Mendoca), German businessman Florian Klotz (Bruno Schiappa) or a British mystery writer ( Jacob Jan de Graaf). And just why is police inspector Lopes (Sérgio Praia) snooping around?
As intriguing as some of these subplots are, the sprawling cast — it seems as if every working actor in Lisbon gets a shot — may sprawl a bit too much. A couple of characters, such as the over-the-top, comedic-relief twosome of Gertrudes and Gremilde, feel like they might have flitted in from a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan musical, or maybe their appeal just gets lost in translation. (“Vidago Palace” is in its original Portuguese and Spanish with English subtitles.)
Still, with “A Place to Call Home” just wrapping up its final season, “Vidago Palace,” which was a big enough hit in Portugal last year to warrant a global distribution deal, serves as yet another satisfying post-“Downton” chaser.