Amazon.com video review:
Salted pork shanks as leitmotiv in a dark comedy about an
absurd love triangle: this is what post-Franco cine is all
about (food and sex). Spanish tortillas (i.e., potato omelets)
are also big in this one. Director José Juan Bigas Luna's
Jamón Jamón is intelligent, wry, and--despite the
formulaic narrative that melodrama must essentially
contain--unpredictable. At times his film exudes a certain
Almodóvar flavor, but there is an edge, perhaps a
heavy-handedness, to the dark humor that is either Luna's success or
his downfall. The film garnered the Silver Lion at the Venice Film
Festival, after all. Try to follow: sexy Penelope Cruz (Belle Epoque) is
growing up with her mother outside town on the highway, on the wrong
side of the highway. Together they run a truck stop where cars and
life literally race past. Cruz is in love with Jordí Molla, by
whom she is pregnant. Molla's bourgeois mother, played by Anna Galiena
(Being Human),
thinks he can and should do better. (Of course, neither Cruz nor his
mother knows of the erotic, hmm, avian interludes Molla enjoys on the
side.) To save her son from the lower classes, Galiena hires Javier
Bardem, a muscular, pretty man (whose regular consumption of the pork
he distributes for a living has enhanced his sexual appeal) to pursue
Cruz. The dark comedy finds a proper ending to the triangle in a
grotesque but comedic landscape of death. This is not a cookie-cutter
movie but rather one that will resonate with both your light and dark
sides. After each surprise, you'll chuckle, feel guilty, and chuckle
again. --Erik Macki
