The ingenious erotic wordplay of Bigas Luna’s ‘Jamón Jamón’
In today’s cultural landscape, we know the popular pull of both Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem well. After all, the iconic Spanish acting couple are two of their nation’s most notorious and acclaimed modern stars, having both proven themselves in Europe and on the Hollywood stage for several decades.
Cruz possesses a wildly impressive filmography comprised of efforts in the likes of Belle Epoque, Live Flesh, All About My Mother, Pain and Glory, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Volver and Nine, as well as a number of collaborations with legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who has frequently cast the Alcobendas-born actor.
As far as Bardem’s career goes, the son of actor Pilar Bardem also came through the ranks in the early 1990s, giving a series of performances in Spanish language movies like Boca a boca, Carne tremula, as well as a number of American cinema works like Before Night Falls, Being the Ricados and No Country for Old Men.
Bardem and Cruz eventually married in 2010, but they had first acted together in Bigas Luna’s 1992 romantic tragicomedy Jamón Jamón, which had actually seen Cruz’s debut film role. Also starring Jordi Molla, Stefania Sandrelli and Anna Galiena, Jamón Jamón is a brilliant and playful exploration of sexuality and desire, with Luna frequently employing an intelligent and humorous air of wordplay and physical pun.
The film tells of Cruz’s character Silvia, a young woman who works in the factory of a successful underwear manufacturing empire. Silvia falls in love with an becomes pregnant by Jose Luis, the son of the owners, but when his mother finds out that her new prospective daughter-in-law is far below in terms of her class, she puts a plan in place to prevent their marriage.
The plan consists of bringing in a strapping young bullfighter, Raul, played by Bardem, to lure Silvia away, but eventually, the wealthy Conchita falls for him herself. Sexual relationships occur all over the place in Jamón Jamón, leading to an absolutely hilarious exploration of sexuality and its farcical elements.
Concerning its brilliant wordplay, even the title uses language in a clever manner. “Jamón”, of course, means “ham” in Spanish, which functions as a slang term for the male genitalia, made all the more humorous by the fact that Raul works as a delivery driver for a ham company. In addition, Jamón Jamón doubles up the amount of ham on offer, which looking from the film is an awful lot, and in English the title sounds like “come on, come on”.
The act of eating ham in Luna’s film is a frequent event, and it pretty much always carries with it a sexual undertone, particularly when Raul offers a slice either to Silvia or Conchita, underlyingly as a symbol of his masculine sexual desire. “Come on, come on” is not only sexually charged in its own right but also taps into the Spanish bullfighting culture as its backdrop, yet further evidence of the overt masculine power at the narrative’s centre.
In addition to the wordplay on offer in Jamón Jamón, there are plenty of visual gags on offer, which normally also have to do with the male body. As the film reaches its tragic conclusion, the showdown scene between the many conflicted characters takes place against a freezer warehouse full of giant ham legs, amplifying the inventive wordplay that has occurred previously.
Luna delivered one of Spanish cinema’s most inventive uses of language in the cinematic medium in Jamón Jamón, and not only brought together the future Hollywood icons and celebrity couple of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz but also used words to explore the nature of sexuality and desire in the most hilarious of ways.
