Sensuous and striking. Strictly for adults only! Meat on meat. Not recommended for vegetarians or vegans. Intrigue, love, jealousy, a tsunami of hormones. A dirty Latin American soap opera. And more: matador, tortilla, paella, ham and a whole lot of garlic. The Spanish Bigas Luna made his name with this film. The movie as a whole pans out like a liberated españolada, and, in its highlighting of incredibly trashy Spanish cliches, Jamón Jamón is a close cousin of the films of Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Berlanga and even Almodóvar. It could even be interpreted as a surreal opera. The youthful romance of the pregnant girl who sews underwear and man who delivers ham is made more complicated by the director of the underwear factory, who happens to be the mother of the father to the sewing girl's unborn baby. From this crazy melodrama unfolds a chaotic blur of emotions and values. Men who are unable to grow up and who are desperate to prove their masculine strength. Women who do not allow the men to grow up. The search for attachment: is it possible that animals are more lovable than this?
Bigas Luna represents this passionate abundance of foolishness with pig and porcine symbols, and raises some questions that are far from easy to answer. Such as whether we are capable of dealing with our current world using a set of guidelines of a world which is fast disappearing. Jamón Jamón is a reflection on a culture which is living and destructive. And at the end of it all, we still don't know if it's okay to put garlic in your tortilla.