Maspalomas: an older gay man gets his mojo back after a stroke in this familiar feel-good comedy
José Ramón Soroiz gives a spirited performance as a newly single gay man whose sexual freedom is cut short by illness in this well-crafted crowdpleaser that puts its focus squarely on the people.
- Reviewed from the 2025 San Sebastian Film Festival
For Vicente (José Ramón Soroiz), septuagenarian protagonist of wry Spanish drama-comedy Maspalomas, the metaphorical closet was his refuge and trap for the first 50 years of his life. His ’coming out’ as a gay man ended both his marriage and his relationship with his daughter but resulted in 25 years of happiness with his younger, wealthier partner Esteban.
The film begins shortly after his break-up with the latter, as newly-single Vicente hedonistically samples the delights of the eponymous LGBTQ+-friendly Gran Canaria resort. But when he overdoes things late one evening, he is incapacitated by a stroke and finds himself resident of a care-home… and back in the closet.
Maspalomas is the seventh feature-length production from a triumvirate of writer-directors based in the Basque resort of San Sebastian, operating under the collective moniker ‘Moriarti’ (also the name of their production-company). The trio – Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga – switch duties from project to project; Maspalomas is the first since to be officially directed by the Arregi/Goenaga duo since the initial Moriarti picture back in 2007: Lucio, a documentary profile of a bricklaying anarchist.
Like that film, Maspalomas is primarily a character-study of a spirited gentleman in the twilight of his years: in the pre-stroke prologue, Vicente cuts a dapper figure with his carefully-coiffed, toffee-coloured hair, matching moustache, and colourful attire. Entering the care-home in a wheelchair and partially paralysed, Vicente is, shockingly, barely recognisable: white hair and straggly beard, his face a crumple of wrinkles, he is a glumly hapless shell of his former, indefatigably independent self.
On the most basic level, Maspalomas is the story of Vicente gradually regaining his mojo – with considerably assistance from his new room-mate Xanti (Kandido Uranga), an ebullient man of conservative views and far-right sympathies (he’s happy about the rise of populist party Vox) and a can-do attitude. Nearly all films set in residential institutions involve such a personification of the life-force – whether protagonist (Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)) or prominent secondary figure (Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted (1999)).
And when – just after the halfway mark of this 115-minute film – we see the care-home residents welcoming the new year of 2020 with unwitting positivity, the screenplay’s ensuing beats, specifically involving Xanti, prove predictable ones. The first TV reports of Covid-19 are laughingly dismissed by Vicente’s co-residents, but the shadow of impending disaster rapidly encroaches.
In tandem, there is a subplot about Vicente’s problematic relationship with his now-adult daughter Nerea (Nagore Aranburu) – she has a young son whom Vicente only very belatedly gets to meet – which perilously skirts the territory of a classy telenovela.
Likewise, the score by Aránzazu Calleja is content to follow conventional contours, with gentle-paced keyboards deployed for especially emotional moments. The camerawork tends towards the busy: numerous slow zooms in and out, several hand-held interludes. And while the queer sex scenes, especially during the prologue, are raunchy and sweaty, explicitness is avoided.
Likewise, the political aspects of the screenplay remain undertones: the context of a Spain which (personified in artistic terms by Almodóvar) heartily embraced progressive and liberal values in the post-Franco period – but which retains a considerable and stubborn conservative/traditional streak – is only lightly touched upon.
For more than a decade, the Moriarti team have enjoyed considerable success in Spain with their combination of mainstream and artistic tendencies, usually foregrounding Basque language and culture – Flowers (2014), The Giant (2017), The Endless Trench (2019) and Marco (2024) – have found considerable favour at the Goyas, the country’s BAFTAs equivalent.
Maspalomas is another well-crafted affair, shot on 35mm film but not especially cinematic in its style, apart from bookending sequences on Maspalomas’s spectacular dunes. Arregi and Goenaga seem to go out of their way to downplay the visual potentials of their principal location – San Sebastian’s famed coastal vistas are only briefly glimpsed and relegated to the blurry background.
The focus is, instead, squarely on people: Maspalomas is built around an empathetic and involving performance by Soroiz, who is present in every scene. Everything we see of the resort, the care-home, and of contemporary Spain, we see through his eyes – as he looks out from the cosy shadows of the closet, or amid the brighter lights of the world beyond.