Of the latest news that has come out about Belén Esteban, one is that she was in solidarity with Rosalía in her break with Rauw Alejandro and, another, that on the eve of the last general elections she advised against voting for parties that look to the past.
In both cases, the popular social gathering acted from empathy towards people who may be having a hard time: the Catalan artist, in the process of ending a relationship, on the one hand, and her friends who were in danger of seeing their rights cut off if 23-J won, who, “instead of going forward, can go backwards”, on the other.
It’s about empathy. Of those invisible bonds of solidarity with someone whom we suppose to be in a situation similar to ours, even though we are not even capable of explaining to ourselves what that connection consists of.
In those links, we believe, is what filmmaker María Antón Cabot wanted to delve into in her unique short film I’m vertical but I’d like to be horizontal, screened at the last edition of the Atlàntida Film Fest, with the character of Belén Esteban as co-protagonist, which Astrid Meseguer already reviewed in this newspaper.
The starting point of the film could not be more extravagant, since the subject that Cabot addresses is the impossible encounter between Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and the Madrid gathering (1973) in 21st century Benidorm. A trip back in time motivated by a reflection of the sun in combination with the extreme sensitivity of the writer give rise to this crazy but, at the same time, lucky coincidence on the sand of the beach.
The city on the Costa Blanca is the protagonist of history in its own right. In it, the American poet and her husband, Ted Hughes, spent their honeymoon in the summer of 1956, before returning to Massachusetts. With Benidorm, Esteban maintains a source of ties and, in addition, it is the hometown of the film’s director. So the city stands in her film -as if it were a kind of homage- in the third vertex of a triangle of feelings and solidarity that articulates the plot.
María Antón Cabot could have limited herself to documenting the passage through the city of an author who not only does not lose validity, but also gains poetic significance as time goes by dilutes her status as a myth associated with a suicide for love in the midst of vital and literary youth. .
But he wanted to go further. She has launched into exploring this universe shared between two women who have in common their dislocation in a world that, with disparate space and time coordinates, is as inhospitable as it is elusive.
That is probably the only thing they share, but it is more than enough to build from here on an ephemeral friendship based on understandings, with texts taken from their respective writings (Esteban’s is the book Ambiciones y reflexiones, published by Planeta in 2013). as a backdrop.
That girls’ night out in a Benidorm of Hopperian bars and beaches taken from a Rohmer film is quite a poetic and psychedelic journey, with the advantage of not having to consume psychotropic substances to enjoy it. See you tomorrow on Filmin. It would deserve to have a long and rewarding life.
