The feature film Jamón, Jamón, directed by the Catalan director Bigas Lunas (1946 – 2013), was screened this Saturday 22 October at the Teatro Zorrilla in a tribute to the 30th anniversary of its premiere.
Present at the tribute were Celia Orós, Bigas Luna’s widow, and his daughter, Betty Bigas, as well as Javier Angulo, director of Seminci, and several members of the crew of the, in Angulo’s words, “iconic film of the 90s”: the editor Teresa Font, the director of photography José Luis Alcaine and Santiago Fouz, professor at Durham University and expert on the director’s filmography.
“Andrés Vicente Gómez [the film’s producer] told me about the script and Bigas Luna asked me what I thought of it. I told him it sounded like an opera. They are not going to sing and there will be no music, but the story seems to me to contain all the elements of an opera”, said Alcaine.
In Jamón, Jamón, José Luis is the son of a wealthy married couple who own a men’s underwear factory, where his girlfriend Silvia works. When the young woman becomes pregnant, he promises to marry her despite her parents’ opposition. In order to thwart this unwanted wedding, the mother decides to hire a young aspiring bullfighter to seduce the girl.
“Bigas told me that he had problems with the weather and some sequences during filming. It looks simple from the outside but it wasn’t. I was very happy to work with him. I was very happy to work with him. I loved his films and I knew there was good material. He taught me that you have to look and look again,” said Teresa Font.
She has been joined in her words by Santiago Fouz, who defines the film as one that “I could talk about all night. It seems to me like a moving painting with references to Goya and Dalí. I have seen it more than 100 times and I no longer listen to it, I see it”.
