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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Sunday, August 31, 2025

The Tit and the Moon (Bigas Luna, 1994)

Biel Duran in The Tit and the Moon

Cast: Biel Duran, Mathilda May, Gérard Darmon, Miguel Poveda, Abel Folk, Laura Mañá, Genis Sánchez, Xavier Massé, Victoria Lepori, Xus Estruch, Jane Harvey. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Aimé Deudé. Film editing: Carmen Frías. Music: Nicola Piovani. 

As the title suggests, The Tit and the Moon is one of Bigas Luna's ribald skewerings of the Spanish male ego. But what sets it apart from Jamón, Jamón (1992) and Golden Balls (1993), its predecessors in Luna's "Iberian Trilogy," and what makes it somehow more shocking, is that the protagonist is a 9-year-old boy. Tete (Biel Duran) develops a breast fixation when his mother (Laura Mañá) gives birth to a baby brother. Watching her nurse the infant, Tete begins to long for a breast he can call his own, and wishes on the moon for it. So when Estrellita (Mathilda May), a beautiful, well-endowed Frenchwoman, arrives in his small Catalonian town, he thinks his wish has been fulfilled. But he has rivals for her attention, not only her husband, Maurice (Gérard Darmon), but also a local, Miguel (Miguel Poveda), whose flamenco love songs attract her attention. The rest is a fantasia, narrated from Tete's not always reliable point of view, involving human pyramids, farting, a waterbed, a pet frog, motorcycles, a bodybuilder called Stallone, and much else. It's not like any other coming of age movie, and not all of it works, but it holds your attention if only because you keep wondering what will happen next.  


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