(It’s official: the Spanish are the nuttiest creatures on the planet…)
CAST: Stefania Sandrelli, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Jordi Molla, Juan Diego, Anna Galiena.
DIRECTOR: Bigas Luna.
WARNING: Some SPOILERS and seriously scary Spanish trysts straight ahead…
JAMON JAMON is one fucking weird movie. And given I’m a bizarro who watches and highly rates most Dario Argento movies, that is saying something. JAMON JAMON is also our most unlikely Valentine Flick. And given that our Valentine’s line-up has included such out-of-left field plot elements as a retired judge who eavesdrops on his neighbors’ phone calls (ROUGE), a NYC gay dude and a Guido ending up best friends (KISS ME, GUIDO), and a married Italian man who travels to Istanbul and ends up unexpectedly falling in love with a Turkish guy (STEAM, THE TURKISH BATH - coming up next), that is also saying a whole lot.
The thing is, if you were to extract JAMON JAMON’s superficial premise, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done in American movies before. Consider this: the uppity-mother of a rich guy doesn’t want him to marry his low-class girlfriend - so she hires a studmuffin to seduce the girl so she will change her mind about marriage. This was practically the plot of SABRINA. Only while SABRINA played the premise fairly straight, JAMON JAMON dresses it up in bulging crotches on underwear models, nude bullfighters, pigs getting run over by motorcyles, Penelope Cruz’s tits getting more suction than a carpet on vacuum day. In other words: to the loyal fan who sent me this recommendation, thanks for scarring my brain, dude. I may never go back to Spain again.
When a movie opens on a tight shot of a dude’s boner bulging through his underwear while he practices for a bullfight, and ends with two dudes beating each other to death with huge slabs of ham, there really aren’t that many adjectives you can use to describe the whole thing except... “What. The. Fuck?” Oh, sorry. Those weren’t adjectives. My bad.
Anyhow, if it weren’t for the fact that this flick stars some veteran stars (Stefania Sandrelli) and some future ones (Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem), I would almost write it off as amateur porn with just a little bit more plot than your usual “Mailman Interrupts Horny Housewife” set-up. But, we have a couple of future Oscar-winners in the cast, so all I can think of is they were just starting in the business - and starring in this flick actually beat starring in an actual porn flick. Shit, at least with the porn flick, they would have gotten off for sure. Or at least Javier Bardem would’ve.
But I digress. I will make an attempt to sketch out the plot a little, considering some people actually seem to think this ham-fest (in more ways than one) is actually a classic. Wow, guys. Wow. So here goes:
Okay… Penelope Cruz plays this sweet-young-thing who works as an underwear tailor (seriously) who is also fucking the company owner’s son (Jordi Molla). Unfortunately, the son’s uppity mother (Stefania Sandrelli) doesn’t want him marrying Spanish trailer trash, so she hires her latest underwear model (who got the gig based on the size of his bulge) to seduce her so that she can change her mind about getting married. The underwear model is played by Javier Bardem, so it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that our heroine’s mind is going to be changed - along with her world being rocked.
Will the uppity mother’s plan work? Will our sweet-young-thing fall for the underwear model? Will her fiancee fight to win her back? Or will he have an affair of his own? Do any of these people do anything besides scheme and fuck? And what’s with all the ham-fondling going on? I mean, I know the Spanish loves the stuff - but damn. And the most important question of all. How the fuck did I get talked into reviewing this fucking movie?
Dude. You. So. Owe. Me. You know who you are.
BUT, SERIOUSLY: Seriously, folks… I’d like to give you a serious-minded, balanced discussion of JAMON JAMON. Unfortunately, it blew more than a dozen synapses in my brain, so I will just share the following with you:
1. It’s not the worse movie I’ve ever seen.
2. It’s one of the quirkiest. But not in a good way.
3. The acting is strong, but the characters are mostly unpleasant and unappealing.
4. It’s definitely not the classic some people think it is..
5. In the end, I consider it a valentine to the crazier side of love - and the insane things it pushes people to. In that regard, it is perfect.
6. In any other regard, it is just an average flick.
7. If you love ham (food and comedy-wise), you will love this flick. All others, beware.
That’s all.
