A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Golden Balls (Bigas Luna, 1993)

Maribel Verdú, Maria de Medeiros, and Javier Bardem in Golden Balls

Cast: Javier Bardem, Maria de Medeiros, Maribel Verdú, Elisa Tovati, Raquel Bianca, Alessandro Gassmann, Benicio Del Toro, Francesco Maria Dominedò, Albert Vidal, Ángel de Andrés López. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Irene Montcada. Film editing: Carmen Frias. Music: Nicola Piovani. 

Maybe it's just my Trump Derangement Syndrome asserting itself, but I can't help noticing the resemblance of Benito González (Javier Bardem), Bigas Luna's protagonist in Golden Balls, to our current president. There's the swaggering machismo, the obsession with glitz ("Two Rolexes!"), and the dodgily financed real estate development designed for self-aggrandizement. The chief difference is that Benito gets to suffer at the end, which hasn't yet come for his real-life counterpart, and when it does I doubt that we'll see him sobbing as he rips a bidet from its moorings at Mar-a-Lago. Luna's film is a satiric tragicomedy about the rise and fall of Benito, whom Bardem plays with great flair, just enough to see why people might fall for his bullshit, and with just enough vulnerability that we can feel a slight twinge of sympathy when he falls victim to his own connivings. If it's not an entirely satisfactory movie, it's because Luna has too many ideas that he wants to jam into the film, including some touches of surrealism borrowed from Salvador Dalí that astonish more than they illuminate. But as a modern moral fable, one with continuing relevance, it succeeds. 


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