• French Cinema Nudity is updated

Huevos de Oro

Bigas Luna has made a career out of odd films, and this is no exception to the rule. In terms of visuals it has kind of an Almodovar meets Salvador Dali meets Russ Meyer kind of thing going on, combining colorful and flamboyant locales with surrealistic dreams and breasts. In terms of source material, it's a blend of Scarface, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, and the Sydney Sheldon novel of your choice. Layered on top of all of that are the type of obsessive and quirky characterizations one might find in a Pewter Greenaway movie, with a leading man who has to have a woman of precisely the correct weight, and gets off on drawing geometric patterns on his women.

I know those things don't really go together, but Luna does not know that, which is what makes him a unique filmmaker.

As in Scarface, a working class guy seems to have an impossibly big dream. He wants to be the biggest developer in Spain and to build its tallest skyscraper. Never mind that he's an uncultured boor doing military service in Africa and knows nothing about either business or architecture. He has one very important talent - women like him. A lot. The name of the film is "Golden Balls," and that reflects the fact that he turns his testicles into success. An aspiring model/actress (Maribel Verdu) is so in love with him that she's willing to sleep with important clients and bankers to advance his career. He has such a complete hold on her that he calculates correctly that she will continue to serve him if he marries another woman, so he marries yet another woman who can help his career, the daughter (Maria de Medieros) of a big-time banker. You'd think his world would start to collapse when his wife and mistress find out about the arrangements, but it turns out that they are soulmates, and fall in love with one another, while also continuing to have sex with him, sometimes in a threesome.  At this point, he has everything a man could want. Starting with no education nor money nor family connections, he has achieved power and wealth and has two great women who love him and agree to share him.

Now he is finally cruising for a fall, and that's what the rest of the film is about. He loses his mistress in an automobile crash, and also loses his manhood in the accident. Without his golden balls, he is nothing. Trying to recapture his studly mojo, he tries to replace the mistress with a hot floozy (Raquel Bianca), thinking his wife will also accept her as a replacement in their threesome. The wife finds this idea ludicrous, and divorces him. He then loses the financing for his buildings, and loses his best friend in an industrial accident. He ends up living in Miami with the floozy in a run-down little house, but he can't even hold on to her because of his impotence, so she ends up having an affair with their gardener (Benicio del Toro!!). To add insult to injury, the floozy is actually paying the gardener to give her a good hearty rogering from time to time. The second half of the movie ends up just as the first half did - with a sexual threesome, but this time it is Bardem sitting and watching, impotent and helpless, while the gardener pleasures his woman - and gets paid for it.

The end.

That plot summary only reflects the Sydney Sheldon and Ayn Rand portions of the film's influences. You probably realize that the plot above is the essence of every book by Sydney Sheldon (not to mention Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins), but if you also noticed a close kinship to Rand's The Fountainhead, give yourself an "A" for remembering your freshman "Survey of Literature" class. But all that is merely plotting, and that alone doesn't really convey the flavor of the film. The path to the end of the story is nowhere near as straightforward as I've led you to believe. Along the way are 15 minutes of sex scenes, karaoke to Julio Iglesias songs, surrealistic dream sequences, fey men prancing about in small bathing suits, all sorts of obsessive talks about Rolex watches, smells, and women's precise weights. Plus plenty of over-the-top symbolism playing on the whole correlation between his erections and his ... other erections.

One of the sex scenes would have involved some graphic cunnilingus -  except that Bardem couldn't stop talking about business deals long enough to concentrate on Maribel Verdu's honeypot. Of course that seems normal compared to another scene where Bardem watched his wife and his mistress copulate, interrupting their passion to ask his wife if his beige shirt was ironed for his trip the next day.

As I indicated at the beginning of this essay, it's odd stuff. One thing you can grant to writer/director Bigas Luna is that he is unique. Golden Balls is so exaggerated and so far from real life that it's not even possible to determine whether it is supposed to be a morality play structured like a Sheldon-style melodrama or whether it is a dark parody of that kind of movie.

Actually, I'm not sure it really matters. Any movie with Maribel Verdu naked for five minutes at a time is OK by me.

Hall of Fame nudity in general.

Collages tomorrow. Film clips today.

• Elisa Tovati plays Bardem's first love. She cheats on him with his friend. Elisa is the one with Bardem in this scene. You can see how she keeps looking over at the other guy, who is with a different woman. The other woman is unidentified.
• Maribel Verdu - two sex scenes.
• A sex scene with Maria de Medeiros.
• The three-way scene with Bardem, Medeiros and Verdu.
• Raquel Bianca with Bardem - and even a bondage scene for Hankster.
• The three way with Bianca, Del Toro, and Bardem.

Bug

I already covered this

Here are some better caps from this film clip from a Russian DVD. At least this time the DVD producers dubbed OVER the English, instead of having the Russian and English spoken simultaneously.

 

Dance With Death

Today we have Barbara Alyn Woods, who plays a reporter who goes undercover (or should I say uncovered) to catch a killer who is knocking off the dancers at a strip club. You can get the idea from there as Barbara stripteases her way through the movie.

It's a Boy/Girl Thing

Remember that movie were 2 people can't stand each other and they wish the other one was in their shoes and the next day they exchange bodies?

Well they made another one.

This time it's two neighbors, the Geek Girl (Samaire Armstrong) and the Popular Boy (Kevin Zegers). The movie plays out lots of possiblesituations something like this could cause, like the boy waking with a boner and the girl in the showers. There is some nice nudity and some not so nice, but that was made for laughs. Of course the two of them end up together in the end, so they went with the popular ending.
 

Brooke D'Orsay

Samaire Armstrong

Uncredited