Men Are Pigs in Jamón Jamón (And Women Aren’t Much Better)
Bigas Luna’s Jamón Jamón (“Ham, Ham”, 1992), the first of the Spanish director’s “Iberian” trilogy, which included Huevos de Oro (“Golden Balls”, 1993) and La teta y la luna (“The Tit and the Moon”, 1994), opens with repeated close-ups of Javier Bardem’s bulging crotch. This sets the tone for what follows, a sun-soaked, high-libido drama of criss-crossing passions.
The film, which was intended by Luna as an excavation of the dark erotic energies of his country, proceeds in wild melodramatic lurches close to Spanish TV soap opera or an old stage comedy where characters fall in and out of love of a whim in a rumbustious moral critique of desire’s overriding unpredictability. Penélope Cruz, in her debut screen role, plays the beautiful, naive Silvia. Abandoned by her father, she lives with her sisters and mother, Carmen, in a small roadside village in the Spanish desert. During the day she works at an underwear factory — the primary local income source — and at night she makes omelettes to sell to the workforce there. Carmen, runs a bar, used to be a prostitute, and may still be one.
Silvia is dating the spoiled José Luis, the son of the wealthy family who own the underwear empire, and when she misses two periods they decide to get married. Terrified of upsetting his mother, who views Silvia as low class trash, and remembers when her husband went to “visit” Carmen, José Luis doesn’t tell her about the pregnancy, but when he announces his intention for marriage, his distraught mother puts a plan into action. She pays the swaggering, macho Raúl, an underwear model and bullfighter, to seduce Silvia.
Raúl is all action and physicality, with a dick that drives women crazy: one night he strips off, sneaks into a bull pen and practices his matadore technique stark naked. Bulls and swine run through the narrative; “pig” is what Silvia keeps calling Raúl. People and animals mix and blur into eachother; a machismo culture obsessed with having, or lacking, “the balls” produces subjects prone to rash emotion and sudden violence.
Raul puts the moves on Silvia — hard — and finds himself actually falling for his target. Which is a problem for José Luis’s mother, who is now passionately enamoured with the young man, and has wild sex with him in a motel. Meanwhile, Silvia and Jose Luis are drifting apart; she’s seen the pure body energy of Raul, and fallen hard for it, and José Luis seems needy and unimpressive in comparison. Oh, José Luis also sleeps with Carmen, with whom he seems to know in a professional capacity.
It’s all a mess. It ends with José Luis and Raul brawling in the dirt, battling with legs of pork. José Luis is killed, and the parents show up for a final tableux of comfort and grief, a karmic kick against their selfishness.
More than a romantic comedy, Jamón Jamón is best described as a comedy of appetites, a generic form that stretches back to the Renaissance theatre: people are constantly opening their mouths, licking, kissing, sucking on fingers and nipples, tasting garlic or omelette. They are insatiable.
In Hollywood’s romantic comedies — and romances in general — characters talk out their connections or conflicts and then, at some point, have sex. They communicate, then shag. But in Jamón Jamón they communicate through shagging. And they seem to really enjoy it. It’s a handy way to outline story direction — who wants who, who’s with who — but it also speaks to the kind of embodied personalities we don’t see in mainstream cinema, populated as it is by action figures.
It’s tempting to read the world of the film as one of liberated eroticism, and there is something expressive and rich about the aesthetics of bodies in the desert, but the stacked complications of the story and the final, pathetic imagery of dudes swinging pork at eachother, clue us in to something more compromised.
