The earth always rotates at a relatively constant speed, and if its human inhabitants sometimes feel as though they have stepped up a gear, it is only because their days are too full and their nights too short, and not because of one Second lost due to rotation. Increased work and overstimulation take their toll. That is why there are so many wellness hotels and day spas are springing up like mushrooms in the cities. So it was only a matter of time before wellness hit the screens.
For example, there’s Masha (Nicole Kidman) who is on the series Nine Perfect Strangers invites nine guests in need of help into a modern glass palace in front of gentle, green hills, where she then treats them with an imperturbable expression. At least for the first two or three episodes, your oasis looks like something you like to go to: there is a strict ban on cell phones. Whole lives are rearranged here, with the use of hallucinogens if necessary. As the series progresses, it becomes clearer that Masha’s little yoga hell is not for everyone. Do you want illegal substances and near-death experiences? But whatever. If you can’t get anywhere in reality because of the pandemic, fiction should at least transport you to places that don’t even exist.
That is the attraction of a vacation on the screen or on the screen: that it cannot be booked for a variety of reasons. It is up to you who qualifies for Mashas Resort – for most people a stay would be too expensive anyway. The new series Acapulco Apple Plus does not take place on earth as we know it: the resort in question cannot exist, and the series is set in 1984. There are currently no possible means of transport.
Who wouldn’t love to confide in Masha (Nicole Kidman) in “Nine Perfect Strangers” at Tranquillum House?
(Photo: Amazon Studios)
Acapulco borrows the hang of it How I met your mother: In a villa by the sea with a butler and pizzas flown in from New York, the multimillionaire Maximo conjures all sorts of things out of a box, which he uses to tell his little nephew how he got a job as a pool boy at the Las Colinas resort in 1984 and how he felt among the rich and Nice served upstairs until it was enough for the villa with butler. Pop stars and Cary Grant stay in Las Colinas, but occasionally also poor eaters, and the terrace with the pool flows into a sandy beach on which the waves gently beat without a single hotel tower being visible anywhere. Las Colinas is a mythical creature made of stone, sand and souls.
The resort is heartfelt, because the Mexican employees are on site to make their careers, but all of them have hearts of gold. When Maximo realizes that a young guest, whom he offered a fictitious triple-platinum engagement package for a thousand dollars, actually had to scrape together the money for the vacation with his loved one, he gave up the money and still gave his best to make the proposal something special – and of course the others will ultimately join in.
The most enchanting places not only look good, they are ideal as an idyll of horror
“My mother was scared,” says Maximo, the multimillionaire in the frame story, “Las Colinas would change me, but maybe it was the other way around.” Oh well. Also in The Morning Show, the mother of all Apple series, the heroes in the end are those who at some point don’t care about money and careers and do the right thing. Whether this credo of the content at Apple now necessarily fits the parent company is simply left up to each individual for assessment. But the holiday series principle is currently booming: in the past few weeks, it was not Acapulco and Nine Perfect Strangers (Amazon Prime) also on Sky the series The White Lotus at the start, the clientele of a Hawaiian luxury resort is satirically targeted.
Film and television are not only so keen on choosing the most enchanting places in the world because the pictures are more appealing – of course, a luxury resort simply looks better than a poorly cleaned dump. The perfection of the background also has a dramaturgical function – it is seldom as sugar-sweet as in Acapulco or his close relative, ZDF– dream ship. Most of the time horror lurks behind the idyll, whose ugly grimace comes into its own. The luxury resort makes such a good setting for the same reasons that so many crime novels since Agatha Christie have been set in pretty English villages that nestle against green rolling hills. The horror comes in Nine Perfect Strangers and The White Lotus in very different clothes – at Masha, for example, a guest is locked in the floating tank, in The White Lotus, cheerful in tone, the mother-in-law appears uninvited on the honeymoon.
The idea with the hotel as the location is not new, in “People in the Hotel” in 1931 Greta Garbo fell in love as a dewy ballerina with a bon vivant who was after her pearl necklace. Whole series have also played in resorts or hotels in the past . For example, Agatha Christie herself has Evil under the sun settled in a luxury hotel, and that was almost exactly eighty years ago. Hotels and resorts make excellent backdrops for any story: you have your characters in the same place, nobody can get out of their way, and where people are crammed together, something is guaranteed to happen. This is how it works Airport and Dirty Dancing, and not even Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray would have made strange friends without the Hyatt in Tokyo Lost in Translation.
It has become something special again, because the Maldives vacation is never climate-neutral
Above all, however, the filmed resort serves our own recreation: the resorts have increased their market value as a place of action because it has become something special again to travel – as long as we were all on the way, at most the cruise was exciting enough, there were also club vacations in reality. In addition to the pandemic, there is also the knowledge that the Maldives vacation will never be climate-neutral.
Sometimes it is enough to be elsewhere in your mind. A movie can be a day spa. One of the best hotels in the world, those that no earthly luxury resort, however great, priceless, can compete with, is the one in the movie adaptation of the aforementioned Agatha Christie crime thriller Evil under the sun from 1980, with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. An invented Adriatic monarchy, a discarded summer palace functions as a hotel, which the king gave to his exes: a tiny island, you can walk around it in half an hour, with three bays with sparkling turquoise water and a pine forest, about a dozen Guests meet for lunch on the terrace and in the evening sip cocktails to Cole Porter music, while the red sun disappears into the sea on the horizon. What you see there is actually Mallorca, and of course you can go there, but you will not find this summer palace – it does not exist, it is a fragment of different places and buildings and backdrops. No more than a little inspiration for dreams. The cinema and television are a kind of travel agency of the imagination.