Nobody Saw Us Leave on Netflix: The Mexican Drama Based on a True Story

Mexico, 1964. Valeria Goldberg is a young Jewish mother trapped in an arranged marriage – and loveless – with Leo Saltzman, son of a powerful businessman who heads one of the most influential families in the local Jewish community. The wedding was orchestrated by their respective parents, with the relationship between the two spouses characterized by emotional coldness and growing misunderstandings. Despite the birth of their children, Tamara and Isaac, who represent the only element of happiness, their union remains only on paper.

In Nobody Saw Us Leave, we discover at the beginning of the film how the man decided, at the urging of his oppressive father, to kidnap the children and take them abroad to remove them from their mother's control. The reason will soon be revealed, due to her betrayal with her brother-in-law, Leo's sister's husband. An extramarital affair that risked causing a scandal of major proportions and would lead the two spouses to flee and chase each other across half the world, with the children's safety and psyche deeply shaken by that complex situation between their parents.

The Game of Truth

The five episodes of Nobody Saw Us Leave are based on the autobiographical memoir Nadie nos vio partir by Tamara Trottner, who was just five years old at the time of the real events. In those tormented pages, which became a great success especially in her home country, the author recounted her experience as a child torn from her mother and taken not to one but to several foreign countries, under the lie that the woman had intentionally abandoned them because she didn't love them.

At the helm of the project, distributed exclusively in the Netflix catalog, we find Lucía Puenzo, an esteemed Argentine director and screenwriter appreciated by cinephiles for films such as XXY (2007) and The German Doctor (2013), who here serves as showrunner and also directed two episodes.

But the script, for about three and a half hours of total duration, doesn't quite work: despite dealing with an undeniably dramatic story and being based on existing figures, it makes an emotional selection of the various characters that is fundamentally botched on a narrative and emotional level. Certain errors are too easily justified while others are condemned without appeal, immediately unbalancing the tone towards Valeria's mission, even though she is co-guilty, like her closest family members, of what is happening. Obviously, Leo bears far more serious responsibilities, but the accusatory tone seems to forget the underlying premises of certain traumatic choices.

An Unrealistic but Well-Executed Context

The consequences of her adultery, in a society as retrograde as that of the 1960s, are rendered in a far too polished manner, presented as an act of emancipation rather than a betrayal with devastating consequences for all involved, especially the children themselves. On the other hand, Leo is depicted as a weak figure, subservient to his domineering father, a man incapable of independent thought who acts solely to please him, in a profoundly unbalanced whole. Contradictions are set aside to focus on an easy-to-grasp feminism, but one with little substance.

On a technical level, Nobody Saw Us Leave is undoubtedly a well-executed operation, with an accurate and detailed historical reconstruction, with costumes, sets, and environments that accompany us around the world. The escape, in fact, will lead the protagonists to France, Italy, South Africa, and even to the Israeli kibbutzim, again avoiding thorny and contemporary topics in favor of a rather predictable surface.

The limited format – five episodes of about 50 minutes each – should guarantee a dense narrative free of dead time, but at the same time leads to excessive simplifications and narrative developments that seem too rapid or convenient, regardless of how much they align with the veracity of what actually happened.