Jamon Jamon (1992)
Hunk bad boy gets pretty girl. Rich boy doesn't. Everyone wants to fucks everyone. And there's Penelope Cruz... So Cute, So Adorable, So Edible, So Jamón.
A rich boy, a pregnant factory girl and a hired hunk turn dusty Spain into a lust-fuelled circus of bulls, betrayal and weaponised ham.
Silvia works in the men’s-underwear factory owned by the wealthy parents of her boyfriend, José Luis. When she becomes pregnant, he promises marriage but lacks the backbone to face his formidable mother, Conchita, who considers Silvia unsuitable—not least because her mother, Carmen, once worked as a prostitute. Conchita’s solution is deliciously rotten: she hires Raúl, a ham deliveryman, aspiring bullfighter and newly chosen underwear model, to seduce Silvia and break up the couple. Raúl first approaches the assignment like another job for an ambitious young stud, roaring around on his motorcycle and waving his masculinity about like a matador’s cape. Silvia repeatedly rejects him, but pursuit becomes genuine desire, and Raúl begins falling for the woman he was paid to compromise. The joke then turns nastier when Conchita develops her own appetite...
for Raúl and starts dangling money, gifts and status before him. Meanwhile, José Luis keeps proving that his declarations of love are worth considerably less than one of Mummy’s cheques. Silvia’s disappointment, Raúl’s vanity and Conchita’s sexual hunger gradually rearrange the triangle into an entire web of affairs, resentments and humiliations, with the parents’ old secrets making the young lovers’ predicament even messier. Bigas Luna shoots all this as an erotic soap opera crossed with a black comedy and a rural Greek tragedy. Nothing is subtle: breasts taste of ham, garlic becomes an aphrodisiac, motorcycles announce virility, and an enormous roadside bull watches over the characters like the patron saint of insecure Spanish machismo. Yet beneath the outrageous symbolism is a sharp story about class, money and people mistaking possession for love. The comedy is broad, the behaviour frequently ugly and some developments are intentionally absurd, but the film has an intoxicating momentum. Everyone wants somebody they should not have, nobody can keep his or her trousers—or motives—straight, and the gathering jealousy pushes the story away from bedroom farce and towards something increasingly cruel and dangerous.
This is early-1990s Spain with the post-Franco sexual brakes well and truly removed: brash dance music, roadside clubs, lingerie advertising, long drinks, factory wealth and old-fashioned family snobbery all sharing the same sweaty room. Much of the film was shot across Aragón’s stark Los Monegros landscape, including locations around Monegrillo, Peñalba, Candasnos and Pina de Ebro. The empty plains, rumbling trucks on the N-II, isolated cafés, ham warehouse and giant Osborne bull make the region resemble an Iberian Wild West where challenges are issued with crotches, motorbikes and cured pork rather than six-shooters. The vibe is hot, dusty, kitschy and proudly excessive—part telenovela, part erotic carnival, part nightmare after too much garlic and cheap gin. It is sexy and funny until suddenly it is neither, leaving a distinctly bitter aftertaste beneath all that salt and flesh.
Penélope Cruz gives Silvia a vulnerable toughness that stops her from becoming merely the desirable prize passed between competing males. Dark-eyed, expressive and already unmistakably magnetic, she can switch from girlish hope to wounded disgust without making Silvia seem foolish. Stefania Sandrelli is terrific as Conchita, turning maternal control into predatory hunger, while Anna Galiena gives Carmen a warmer but morally complicated sensuality. The film contains frequent sexual situations, frank dialogue and nudity, and Luna’s camera treats bodies as part of its food-and-flesh symbolism. Since Cruz was under eighteen during production, it is better to admire the fearlessness and emotional authority of her performance than join the film’s men in treating Silvia like something displayed in a butcher’s window.
Jamón, jamón is a dark, sexy, disturbing and very sarcastic romance, that mercilessly satirizes Spanish mentality and culture, though it can’t in all honestly be labeled a comedy. It’s no surprise that its most passionate advocates, as well as critics, are Spanish; but to the non-Spanish viewer, it’s still an entertaining and captivating film, because… Penelope Cruz 🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥🔥
José Luis has a cushy corporate job at the lingerie factory his mom owns. After he falls in love and proposes to Silvia, a beautiful laborer on the underwear assembly line, his mom enlists Raul, a potential underwear model and would-be bullfighter, to seduce Silvia.
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