Ham, Eggs, and Milk: Bigas Luna’s Mediterranean Diet

Winner of the Silver Lion at Venice and a box-office smash in Spain, Jamón jamón brought Luna’s career to new heights. The film benefitted from a generous budget and, more importantly, from the discovery of its two leads: Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Luna’s keen eye recognized them as budding stars and built around them a plot tinged with melodrama and a touch of dreamlike grotesquerie. José Luis (Jordi Mollá) is the spoiled only child of a wealthy couple who own a men’s-underwear factory. He woos Silvia (Cruz), one of the factory’s employees, and promises to marry her over his parents’ objections when she gets pregnant. Aiming to thwart the marriage, José Luis’s mother (Stefania Sandrelli) hires Raúl (Javier Bardem)—an attractive, cocky ham deliveryman—to seduce the young woman.

For the most part, Benito is a stylized evolution of Bardem’s irrepressible character in Jamón jamón. Benito is defined through his relationship with women, whom he uses to further his dreams of building the highest skyscraper on the Alicante coast, “a building that’ll grow like a prick.” González Tower is imagined as a commemorative monument to his libido, propped up by four women who represent the four cardinal points: Marta (Maria de Medeiros), his delicate wife, symbolizes the cultured, European north (she can’t stand the Julio Iglesias ballads —such as “Por el amor de una mujer”—her new husband sings on his karaoke machine). Rita (Elisa Tovati)—the first love whom Benito meets during his military service in Melilla on the Moroccan coast—represents the south, Africa and the exotic. Claudia (Maribel Verdú), the lover he enlists to help with his business schemes, embodies an eastern, Mediterranean sensuality. And Ana (Raquel Bianca)—the maneater who finally devours Benito, unmoved by his demise—points west to the United States.

Benito’s character forms the backbone to a plot that tends toward the episodic, more sketched than solidly composed; he brings structural coherence to the canvas. With a handful of exceptions, the film’s narrative style is classical, combining a rugged, stark realism with images and symbols displaying broad strokes of surrealist influence. The mise-en-scène is scattered with hints at the director’s indebtedness to Dalí, whom he met personally in the late ’70s. In a mordant, counterintuitive paradox, Luna makes his brutish protagonist a fervent devotee of the painter. Benito is such a fan that he decorates his gaudy home with reproductions of Dalí’s paintings—including The Great Masturbator and Lincoln in Dalivision—as well as his melting clock sculptures. Lunas’s most Daliesque move is the eruption of a dream sequence, much like the one in Jamón jamón, where the director has free reign to deploy his potent imagination, unrestrained by strict narrative logic. A series of fades moves through visual motifs clearly linked with Dalí’s universe—two eggs with a pair of nude Benitos encased inside, a Venus de Milo statue fitted with drawers, ants swarming over a woman’s sex—along with others belonging to the director’s own singular world, such as Benito, wearing white and a golden chain around his neck, cackling and lewdly grabbing his testicles while a shower of gold coins falls from the sky.

Luna closed his Iberian Trilogy with The Tit and the Moon, his most accomplished autobiographical exercise. In this oneiric fable of a little boy named Tete (Biel Durán) who is obsessed with a ballerina’s breasts, Luna reconciles his childhood memories and gastro-erotic obsessions with the defining fetishes and icons of Catalan identity: from popular traditions like castellets (human towers) to gastronomic offerings like pan con tomate and calçots—a kind of scallion—sauteed with romesco sauce. While the first two films reflect on common currents that make up the culture of the Iberian Peninsula, with this sentimental epilogue he turns inward. Filmed entirely in Catalan (though distributed internationally in a Spanish dub), The Tit and the Moon launched the final stage of his career; though calmer, leaving definitively behind the formal abrasiveness of his early work, it was no less personal and suggestive.

Perhaps because the story is told, through voice-over, from the perspective of the young protagonist, the overall tone is far gentler than that of Jamón jamón and Golden Balls. Where those films are dry and cutting, The Tit and the Moon is wrapped in a timeless, otherworldly atmosphere. In the child protagonist’s narration, reality and fiction live easily alongside each other without contradiction. Luna is at ease in this interstitial space, able to unleash his torrential poetic and visual universe. In this sense, The Tit and the Moon is his most Felliniesque film. The dancer Estrellita (Mathilda May) and her domineering husband Maurice (Gérard Darmon) are variations on Gelsomina and Zampanò from La strada (1954), as Luna himself acknowledged. The influence of Amarcord (1973) is also palpable: the films share a similar blend of imagination and fantasy, a casual and curious approach to sexuality, and a scatological taste for sublimation of the most vulgar bodily functions.

As with the rest of the trilogy, sex is always present, but if in Golden Balls it is animal, and in Jamón jamón erotic, in The Tit and the Moon a lyrical tone dominates. Over these Celtiberian portraits, Luna moves—symbolically and gastronomically—from ham to milk via eggs (huevos being the Spanish slang for “balls”), three essential staples of the Mediterranean diet. Milk represents life force, but also nutrition at its most primordial, inseparable from its generous source, a woman’s breasts. This was the first of Luna’s films to include one of his allattatrici, a personal motif developed in his visual art inspired by the lactating virgins of Christian iconography. In one moving moment—probably one of the most beautiful of all of Luna’s filmography—little Tete experiences a miraculous lactation when Estrellita concedes her open cleavage and fills the child’s mouth with milk streaming from her ample bosom.

While the films Luna made in the wake of the Iberian Trilogy didn’t enjoy as warm a reception, they show his fascination with the creative forces of art and sexuality continuing to evolve. Adapted from a novel by Antonio Larreta, Volavérunt (1999) circles the mysterious death of the Spanish Duchess of Alba (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) in 1802. Eschewing fidelity to the text, Luna extracted what he needed from Larreta’s plot to construct a period thriller in his own indelible style. His interest lay in the opportunity it afforded to approach the painter Francisco de Goya (Jorge Perugorría), whom Luna presents as a taciturn, shy man with a penetrating gaze, mute witness to a court that is frivolous, fickle, and Gallicised, infested with political conspiracy, disloyalty, and infidelity. Goya’s imagery here feeds into the subtly perverse and fetishistic eroticism that always captivated Luna: in the opening credits, the contours of The Nude Maja’s crotch metamorphosize via match dissolve into a poison chalice.

Following Volavérunt’s disappointing critical response—it met with whistles and boos at its San Sebastián Film Festival premiere—Sound of the Sea (2001) was presented as Luna’s return to the territory of the Iberian Trilogy. Once more, the plot weaves together eroticism, gastronomy, and death with an evocatively dreamy tone. The heroine, Martina (Leonor Watling) recalls the earthy beauty of Jamón jamón’s Silvia, Golden Balls’ Claudia, and The Tit and the Moon’s Estrellita. Like these antecedents, Martina is compelled by insatiable and self-destructive desire, leading her into an impossible love triangle. Alberto (Eduard Fernández), like Benito in Golden Balls, typifies the Iberian macho who struts his manliness by throwing money around. Ulises (Jordi Mollà), on the other hand, is a fabulist who seduces the siren by whispering ancient love stories in her ear.

However, Martina differs from her predecessors in other respects. When faced with the choice between Ulises’s intellect and Alberto’s raw sexuality, she chooses the great storyteller over the great lover. Martina also points forward to female characters in Luna’s later works—like the titular protagonist of My Name Is Juani (2006)—by exercising her agency. After a long absence, Ulises reappears in her life. By then she has married Alberto, settling into a luxurious but empty and monotonous existence. Ulises’s return offers an opportunity to rekindle her lost passion. This time, though, she will dictate the rules: she is so determined to enjoy her lover exclusively that she shuts him in an apartment that she owns. Her actions may not save her from a fateful end, but the fantastical, morgue-set ending allows for a glimpse of hope even beyond death.

When Sound of the Sea premiered just weeks before the start of summer, Luna hoped for a more benevolent critical response. The film did attract interest, but ultimately not much enthusiasm, nor did it do particularly well at the box office. Despite everything, Luna never gave in, and he still would have time to deliver his last great film: My Name Is Juani. Loyal to his curious and inclusive spirit, he immersed himself in the youth culture born on the periphery of Spain’s big cities and played with visual motifs derived from video games and the internet. Luna passed away in 2013, but since then his legacy has only continued to grow, his prolific and diverse body of work revealing new facets and becoming the object of study for critics and scholars.

Translated from the Spanish by Ali Sargent