Like Lieutenant Drogo, the protagonist of The Desert of the Tartars , Isabel Coixet also perhaps feels that the confinement, whether at home or in a fortress on the border, has something of revelation. Not just punishment. Everything suddenly takes on new meaning. Everything, in its absolute immutability and identity, ends up being different. «And suddenly, things that we thought were very important seem banal. And vice versa », she says, she takes a second and gives her latest film as an example. It snows in Benidorm , that's the title, it finished shooting six days before the already eternal state of alarm was decreed. The film brings together a heterogeneous cast in the retro-futuristic city of Alicante, ranging from the British rigor of Timothy Spall,Mike Leigh's harsh Turner, Sarita Choudhury's multi-ethnic exoticism passing through Carmen Machi's poetic casticism or Ana Torrent's always tragic depth . "I am thinking, for example, of the references on the tape to Brexit . Who cares about that now? And I think of the scene where she (Sarita) says goodbye with a kiss from him (Timothy). She leaves the mark of her lips on a glass and, from the other side, contemplates the separation and her entire life. OMG! Is this how we will relate from now on? », Asks the director and in the interrogation leaves evidence of probably the same stupefaction of Drogo, the creation of Dino Buzzati, before the immensity of the desert, of time and of solitude itself . And so.

Right now, since last Monday, he meets his editor Jordi Azategui in the Barcelona studio where he gives body and assembles everything filmed. Among them, a screen, a mask (in the case of Isabel, with flowers: "It seems I have a thong on my face") and the obligation not to touch. "We eat separately, we keep distance ... but we are together. In the same way that I don't know how to direct the actors through a monitor, I need to be there to see how the film grows. It cannot be done by teleconference. There are filmed scenes that were not in the script and I need to see the alternatives, the nuances myself ... », she comments on the other end of the phone and, despite this, it is easy to see how she moves her hands. "You have to touch" , sentence. And all this despite confessing immediately that the work with Jordi is long. They know each other to travel the world together with various documentaries and to walk hand in hand in the series Foodie love or in Yesterday never ends.

Sarita Choudhury and Timothy Spall in a moment of 'Nieva en Benidorm'.

“I imagine collective amnesia will do its job and we will soon forget. I am not one of those who idealizes the prepademic world, but I am clear that the first thing I will do as soon as all this happens is to launch into the cinema. I'm sick of the screens. I have suppressed all the scenes in which the characters were watching messages on the phone, "he says in a fiery demand for, for example, the touch of the skin.

Not in vain, the film itself in its own way also goes about that, to appreciate the very and most intimate meaning of things, to touch, to the detailed description of the sensuality of everything that vanishes. To a large extent, the same cinema in Coixet is that. Nieva in Benidorm tells the story of a man looking for his missing brother in a city by strange force. It is a place where Imserso pensioners cross skyscrapers at the foot of the sea with drunken Englishmen, absent-minded tourists and a vaginal acrobat (sic). And behind, the trace of the delicate and aromatic Benidorm that Sylvia Plath met on her honeymoon. Everything is there, outside partitions, to be touched.

«I think of the word pandemic and a moldy bread comes to mind .... People gather on the Levante beach in Benidorm to sing. They sing rancheras, boleros ... They are a hundred. I have the impression that this is the spirit after all this. As long as you want to learn and make mistakes, we are safe, "he says after acknowledging that yesterday he saw things clear. «There is an instant when you recognize the movie you want. I have it », he affirms, already, with the serene and tragic clarity with which Drogo looks at the desert. And the weather.

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