Bikinis Past And Present

When, in 1959, the mayor of Benidorm decided to take the establishment on, he probably couldn't have realised what he was unleashing. Or probably he could. What mayor Pedro Zaragoza did was to permit the wearing of bikinis. He was denounced by the Guardia Civil, threatened with excommunication by the Archbishop of Valencia, sought an audience with General Franco and, no doubt to everyone's surprise, opposition to the bikini was dropped.

So, Benidorm was where the bikini revolution started, but the decision to allow bikinis didn't mean that Spanish beaches were suddenly all exposed to similar quantities of additional bare female flesh as Benidorm's was. Things tended to vary from resort to resort, as was the case in Mallorca. There remained the thorny issue of the Guardia taking exception, so the Spanish tourism ministry had to assure foreign tour operators that, though there was no general law permitting the bikini, the boys in green would not be going around hassling female tourists in a two-piece.

The most influential voice in bringing about greater liberalism and thus the generally accepted practice of bikini-wearing was Manuel Fraga, who was made minister of tourism and information in 1962. This dual portfolio made some sense. Though the masses were starting to hover in the skies over Mallorca and the Costa Brava, Spain's reputation was hardly terribly positive. A key aspect of Fraga's information remit was one that dovetailed with tourism. It was information in the propaganda sense of information. Mallorca and the Costas were to benefit from a more benevolent, benign and Benidorm-liberalised image, and one of the images, to the horror of the Catholic conservative class, was the bikini.

Part of Fraga's propaganda was the use of the film industry. This wasn't entirely novel as the regime was already using films to portray Spain in a better light ("El Cid" was an example). Fraga had less grand notions. There was to be no epic but rather a series of films which featured the two elements of the new tourism industry - sun and beach. One of these films was released in 1962. It starred Elke Sommer. Its title was "Bahia de Palma". It was a romantic comedy in which Sommer played Olga, an heiress socialite with a vicious tongue, opposite Arturo Fernández, a concert pianist who had lost the will to play on account of heart break.

The film was apparently a success. Eager Spanish cinema-goers were repeat visitors to the movie theatres. In Germany - Sommer was/is German - the film was also a success but under a different title, "Spiel und Leidenschaft" (play and passion). Seemingly, it never made it to British cinema screens, and so the British film fan could not enjoy the sight which made "Bahia de Palma" a sensation: Elke Sommer in a bikini.

The title was, though, misleading in that not all location shots were in Palma Bay. Andraitx, Formentor, Santa Ponsa and Valldemossa all featured as well, but these additional locations only helped to do what the film was really intended to do, which was to promote Mallorca. By allowing the odd shot of a bikini, the regime's censors, no doubt advised by Fraga, permitted a promotional coup two times over: one of showing off Mallorca and its beaches and the other of showing what a tolerant and liberal place Spain was after all.

Despite its apparent success in Spain and in Germany, it is not a film that has gone down in the annals of cinema history as having been of any great merit. But it does find a place in that history because of the landmark bikini. It may have been propaganda but it was pragmatic propaganda. Fraga knew the value of greater liberalism and understood that foreign values were different to those of the sexually repressed Spain of that time. Whether the establishment liked it or not, and most didn't, for Spain to reap the full benefits of tourism, it had to lighten up.

This was all fifty-two years ago. An awful lot of bare flesh has since passed under the tourism bridgehead formed by Elke Sommer, but the amount of bare flesh now on show is, so we are led to believe, out of control, hence the "bikini law".

Fraga knew a thing or two about how to handle the media. He was from a different time, but in some ways it might be good were he still around. He might just get the message across correctly. I was asked the other day about the restrictions on wearing bikinis in Mallorca. There are none, only those which Palma are introducing, and which even there are not intended to stop bikini-wearing in the immediate vicinity of the beaches. Somewhere the message is going wrong, and it is, moreover, a message which seems peculiarly of the past. I wonder what Elke Sommer thinks. Bahia de Palma, bikinis verboten.

* Photo: Elke Sommer, "Bahia de Palma".

MALLORCA TODAY - "The Perfect Stranger" on release

The film "The Perfect Stranger", starring Irish actor Colm Meaney and the first feature-length film from Mallorcan director Toni Bestard, is to go on general release in Spain at the end of next week. The film was shot at different locations around Mallorca, including Campanet and Bunyola.

See more: Ultima Hora

MALLORCA TODAY - Cloud Atlas: hotel spaces booked in Pollensa

Location filming for the Hollywood blockbuster version of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" which will star, among others, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Jim Broadbent, is due to take place from the middle of September for two weeks. Sa Calobra will be one of the main locations, and Puerto Soller and Formentor are also scheduled to feature. 180 hotel rooms have been booked in Pollensa for the duration.

A thousand or so hopefuls attended auditions for roles as extras in the film in Palma yesterday.


More on this: The main road into Sa Calobra will be closed for one day (yet to be confirmed). Permission is being sought for a galleon to dock in Puerto Soller and has been granted to use military installations on the Puig Major in the Tramuntana mountains.

Girls On Film

I watched a film the other evening, a good film – by all accounts. I was about to say a good film in any language, but that’s the problem; it is no longer a good film because it is no longer THE film. Give it another language and a drama becomes a comedy of dodgy lip-sync and ill-cast linguistic impersonation. Dubbing. Mostly all international films and TV shows are dubbed here. In the case of “The Queen” – or “La Reina” to give it its Spanish title – the only subtitling was for documentary footage such as Earl Spencer’s oration. Otherwise, Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen and the rest became people other than themselves not just because they were acting but because someone else was acting them – after a fashion.

While I quite understand the desire to dub, it is utterly absurd. When I was in Germany, I was once listening to a radio show that previewed forthcoming films. Showcased was a film with Meryl Streep and Danny de Vito. What was truly surreal was to listen to two German “actors” and to then be told by the presenter that I had been listening to Streep and de Vito. I had not had been. I had in fact been listening to Waltraud and Kurt from Bielefeld and Chemnitz, one of them, for all I could have known, with a wooden leg. In Germany, there used to be a kid who was the German Daniel Radcliffe; probably still is. In all seriousness, this adolescent, the German voice of Harry Potter, used to get wheeled out on TV shows, masquerading as the boy wizard – Heinzi from Hogvorts. I know someone who couldn’t believe Eddie Murphy was Eddie Murphy when he finally heard him speaking without a Germano-Black American voiceover. God alone knows what they do with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But just think about it. What do these “actors” do? Are they living the roles? Are they using their facial expressions, their body actions? Are they on a set in front of a camera? Can Helen Mirren’s Spanish voice really appreciate the interpretation that Mirren brought to the role? Of course she can’t. Basically, a good piece of art is taken and thoroughly mangled by the dubbing.

This is not a plea for using subtitles simply because I can then hear a film in English. I no more want, say, the French families of François Truffaut’s charming “L’Argent de Poche” to be talking with home-counties accents than I want Helen Mirren to be inhabited by a Spanish bint who keeps on referring to some chaps called Felipe and Carlos.

And then there is advertising. “The Queen” appeared on one of the main national channels. Both take advertising. Fifteen minutes into the film there was an interlude that lasted … fifteen minutes. Adverts. They then have the gall to announce “estamos viendo” (we are watching) La Reina. No, we are not watching; we had been until a completely different programme comprising sketches for perfumes and kitchen units had been inserted. All was then fine until the end of the scene with Earl Spencer. Now, I had not seen the film. Had I, I would have switched off at that point. Some fifteen or twenty minutes more of advertising, and then – what – five minutes remaining with Mirren and Sheen walking in the gardens at Buck House. I only took note of the adverts so that I could remind myself never to buy a Volkswagen, to change my mobile account from Vodafone and to give Jane Fonda, and her Spanish voiceover, a good slap when I next see them with a L’Oreal cream.


QUIZ
Yesterday – “My Old Man Said Follow The Van”. Today’s title – which group? Easy.

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