Can you imagine two women from universes as different as that of the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath and that of the 'princess of the people' and national celebrity Belén Esteban maintaining a beautiful friendship? Well, that apparently surreal relationship jumps to the big screen with a great spark and complicity from the hand of the director María Antón Cabot, who in Sóc vertical però m'agradaria ser horitzontal has imagined a setting like Benidorm as a meeting point of those two women who feel tremendously alone.
The 39-minute medium-length film participates in the New Waves section of the Seville Festival and unites these two characters in fiction, played by the Australian actress Odette Galbally, in a space-time vortex of the 1950s and the current Benidorm and the Spanish Ruth Gabriel. The origin of this very peculiar story "arises from the need to tell a little about my city in another way and they are two women who have had a lot of relationship with Benidorm," says Antón in conversation with La Vanguardia.
Esteban has always spent the summer in that tourist town and Plath spent her honeymoon there with Ted Hughes in 1956. "A few years ago a high school teacher did a study of when Sylvia went to Benidorm and compared her work with all the places she had been I had that information in my head and I thought of uniting the two things. They both had parallel lives at different times and I'm sure they could have been great friends", continues the director and member of the lacasinegra creative collective, which has already presented at the contest of European cinema Pas à Genève (2014) and (2018) and that pursues a type of cinema "that takes us out of our comfort zone and our habitual imaginaries".
"I thought that the life of one could be the continuation of the other and that a time jump was something very poetic. It's like a fantasy and science fiction movie but with customs," he laughs. The story begins with Plath in a town house in 1956. She feels exhausted and overheated. Her thoughts come out loud to the viewer as she writes a letter to her mother. Her husband is in bed snoring and she is going for a walk to the market. She says that she has caught Ted looking at other girls. "All men are cynics and liars."
Suddenly, her head hurts and she magically appears in the high-rise Benidorm of 2022. Ruth Gabriel composes a blonde-haired Belén Esteban who is on the beach putting on sunscreen. Plath's striking appearance with wavy blonde hair and elegantly dressed in white immediately catches her eye and she approaches her to strike up a conversation, even though she speaks almost no English.
The Spanish actress remembers how she entered the project: "In the midst of a pandemic, my representative calls me and tells me that he is going to send me an e-mail with a project. 'Look at it with an open mind and then we'll talk,' he told me. I looked at him With an open mind and between astonishment and curiosity, curiosity got the better of me. Especially because on a professional level it was a challenge. And I think it's one of the best decisions I've been able to make because I had a great time".
Gabriel has not had contact with Esteban because "he is unattainable" and he wanted to reflect a Belén who is calmly in her space and her surroundings without having to prove anything because with that you run the risk of making a caricature and we did not want that at all. We want to talk about a woman who, having gone through circumstances that can be very traumatic, what she has done is create an enthusiasm, a strength and a power about it that I think makes her a person so loved by many people. She somehow conveys that hope that 'in the worst I come back', almost like a self-help guru. And it was very nice to explore that Bethlehem without a mask with a stranger opening her heart wide, but not to show it but to share it, which is different. That complicity that is created between the two of them and being comfortable sharing intimacy gave me a lot of peace of mind because I felt closer to the human being, not to the doll."
Odette was chosen in an international casting and there was a lot of chemistry with Gabriel. "That's the key in the film," Antón explains. "And a daring also because we plunged headlong into the project. Her courage gave me strength and we enjoyed filming," adds the Cádiz-born performer, who became known in Días contados (1994), by Imanol Uribe, for which she won the Goya award for best revelation actress.
"I think that if Belén and Sylvia had met, the two would have grown up in a complementary relationship," admits Gabriel, who has had a very hectic professional year. He has been with the theatrical tour of La casa de Bernarda Alba, he has shot the film If all doors are closed, by Antonio Cuadri; Ángel Gómez's first film, El hombre del bogey, and he has just done a spot for Fitur presenting his province, Cádiz. "The pandemic for me has placed me in a place of authentic privilege. I am in a very beautiful and very sweet moment with very different things," he comments radiantly.
In Plath's diaries "there is a lot of inner voice" and the film echoes this. The title refers to a poem by the writer and the director chose it because "it is a poem about life and death and there was a visual parallelism with the city of Benidorm between the buildings and the people lying down and it seemed poetic to me".
