Sound of the Sea (Bigas Luna, 2001)

Jordi Mollà and Leonor Watling in Sound of the Sea

Cast: Jordi Mollà, Leonor Watling, Eduard Fernández, Neus Agolló, Pep Cortés, Ricky Colomer. Screenplay: Rafael Azcona, based on a novel by Manuel Vicent. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Art direction: Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Film editing: Ernest Blasi. Music: Piano Magic. 

A stranger comes to town and wins the hand of a young woman, but when he's lost at sea and ruled dead, she marries a rich man. Then after several years the stranger returns and meets secretly with the young woman, but they're discovered and the rich man takes his revenge. There's not much more to the plot of Bigas Luna's Sound of the Sea than that, although it's dressed up with some trappings of myth: The stranger is named Ulises (Jordi Mollà), evoking the Odyssey, and he woos Martina (Leonor Watling) with quotations from the Aeneid. But the characterization is sketchy: What drives Ulises to abandon Martina and their child and fake his death? What, other than a romantic urge, causes him to return? The film posits no retribution for the revenge by the rich man (Eduard Fernández). And it all concludes with a clumsy coda that seems to signify that love (or at least sex) survives death. It's often beautiful to look at, but not much more than that. 

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.  

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. 

Volavérunt (Bigas Luna, 1999)

Aitana Sánchez-Guión in Volavérunt

La Maja Desnuda, by Francisco de Goya

Volavérunt, by Francisco de Goya

Cast: Aitana Sánchez-Guión, Penélope Cruz, Jordi Mollà, Jorge Perugorría, Stefania Sandrelli, Empar Ferrer, Zoe Berriatúa, Jean-Marie Juan, Olivier Achard, Fermí Reixach. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna, based on a novel by Jean-Louis Benoît. Cinematography: Paco Femenia. Production design: Koldo Vallés. Film editing: Kenout Peltier. Music: Alberto García Demestres. 

Bigas Luna's Volavérunt tries to be several different things before finally settling down as perhaps the least interesting of them. It's an erotic fable, or a historical pageant, or a dramatization of an incident in the life of an artist, or a tale of political intrigue, before it finally becomes a whodunit. The title, which means "they have flown," refers perhaps most directly to one of Francisco de Goya's Caprichos, the artist's series of satirical etchings, which depicts his patron and perhaps mistress the Duchess of Alba, in flight with a group of grotesques at her feet. In the film, he shows his sketch of the scene to the duchess in response to her wish to fly. Which she might well desire, given that the duchess played by Aitana Sánchez-Guión is having an affair not only with Goya (Jorge Perugorría) but also with the Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy (Jordi Mollà), who is also having an affair with Queen Maria Luisa (Stefania Sandrelli). Meanwhile, Goya is painting a pair of portraits of a reclining woman, in one of which she is clothed and in the other nude. He is using as a model Godoy's mistress Pepita Tudó (Penélope Cruz), but the face in the finished portraits is not hers, leading to speculation that the model was actually the duchess. But this famous artistic mystery fades into the background of the movie when the duchess suddenly dies. Luna turns Godoy and Goya into detectives, out to solve the mystery of the duchess's death. Ultimately, the film collapses under the weight of too much historical speculation, both political and artistic, with only the colorful setting and the vivid performances of Sànchez-Guión, Cruz, and Sandrelli to make it memorable. 

Jamón, Jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992)

Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem in Jamón, Jamón

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Jodi Mollà, Stefania Sandrelli, Anna Galiena, Juan Diego, Tomás Penco. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Gloria Martí-Palanqués, Pep Oliver. Film editing: Teresa Font. Music: Nicola Piovani. 

With its copulative roundelay, nude bullfighting, and death by ham, Bigas Luna's satiric black comedy Jamón, Jamón confused and offended some of its early viewers, who may have forgotten that Spain is the country that produced Goya and Dalí.