The golden light of the Costa Blanca.
"Sometimes there is so much light in Benidorm that it doesn't let you see," he tells Alex (Sarita Choudhury) a Peter (Timothy Spall) in It snows in Benidorm, the last movie of Isabel Coixett (Theatrical release December 11). And perhaps that is what has happened to us for so many years. So much light, reflected in the towering facades of its skyscrapers, it did not let us see what the city of Alicante hid in its corners, between its bays, that universe of contrasts and contradictions in which the Spanish and international communities hardly touch each other.
That universe is the one that Coixet discovered a few years ago when she appeared in Benidorm for the first time, to make a documentary about the degradation of the coast and she was fascinated by the characters that populated it: retirees at ease with her new choice of home, Elvis impersonators and burlesque cabaret vedettes as her protagonist, a very sexy mature woman, very much alive.
The skyline of Benidorm.
And in all that mix entered Sylvia Plath and the poet's honeymoon trip in 1956, with Ted Hughes. The five weeks they spent there, in a fisherman's house overlooking the beach, the same place where Coixet places one of her characters: the curator she plays Carmen Machi, obsessed with Plath and with that vision of the poetess in a bikini who speaks of another Benidorm.
In this scenario, the director places her protagonist, Peter Riordan, a methodical, manic and apathetic Englishman, who lives a routine life, always working in the same bank, having breakfast, dinner the same, with a single postcard from Benidorm in the fridge that reminds him of another world in which his brother lives, whom he has not seen for a long time. The only thing that seems to move Peter's blood is the weather, look and photograph the sky every day.
"Time is a way of feeling that something is happening and if nothing is happening, there is always a promise that something will happen" is her strongest belief. Like the weather, life can change in a few minutes. This is what happens to him when he arrives in Benidorm and finds out that his brother has disappeared, that he had a burlesque club, that he didn't know anything about him. Accompanied by Alex, his guide to Benidorm and a new life, he tries to follow the last steps of his brother.
Peter Riordan, a stranger in Benidorm.
From the terrace of his brother's house, in the Lugano Tower see the entire city, the one with the highest density of skyscrapers per inhabitant, that skyline that is now admired and envied, that many visitors now miss in this year of covid. At night, Peter comes down from his heights to that Benidorm street full of crazy farewells from fellow Englishmen, free shots and blinding neon lights.
Again for the day with Alex he discovers a gastronomic Benidorm. In the Llum del Mar Restaurant, in the D-Vora Gastrobar: octopus, red shrimp from Dénia, anchovies with tomato, black rice…
Benidorm, in full sun.
Nothing is impossible in Benidorm. If, as Peter well knows, in a city attractive for its mild climate, it could even snow, everything else is also possible. Even finding love and the desire to live, a second chance to live it all, to discover everything that he didn't even know existed. That is the epiphany that the protagonist has at the top of the red wall, built by Ricardo Bofill in 1973, in which Coixet also had another revelation: with those colors of the Costa Blanca, the film could not be in black and white as he first imagined it. His neonoir needed the color and light of Benidorm, those that until now had dazzled us, those that blind Peter for a moment for later open a new sky, completely clear.
Sarita Choudhury and Timothy Spall.