"Eres un pagafantas!" is the refrain that reverberated around Spain in 2010.
The concept is universal, yet the Spanish are the first culture I know of to associate a particular word to it: The man who pays for the girl's Fanta, during their purely platonic dates where he eternally hopes for romance but she knows there's not a chance in hell.
From this brilliant concept, Pagafantas is in truth quite predictable, but director Borja Cobeaga makes the highs crescendo splendidly while the lows are absolutely gut-wrenching. Chema, the Pagafantas, is even more pathetic and spineless than you'd expect. Claudia, the object of his affection, strings him along more than human decency would seemingly allow. Their yo-yo games lead to a chase through the Bilbao streets, a marriage on a fishing boat, and an accidental flight to Buenos Aires.
So sit back with a cold Fanta and your favorite Enrique Bunbury record to enjoy Pagafantas.
Monday, April 12, 2010
La Teta i la Lluna
Bigas Luna's 1994 drama La Teta i la Lluna is a strange story: a comedy that suddenly becomes a drama, its elements alternating from childly cute to theatrical to obscene.
9-year old Tete is obsessed with breasts and goes on a personal mission to find the perfect pair of lactating breasts to feed on. A French dancer attracts his attention, but he must compete with her boyfriend and a neighborhood pretender. While playfully suggesting that Tete has a real chance of attracting a grown woman (to do what?), the film eventually recognizes that he's only a 9-year-old, and things are not really the way he sees them.
Rarely is one so dissapointed with a full book after being enamored with the first chapter, but such is the case with La Teta i la Lluna. Tete's inner monologue about breasts - he regards his mother's to be the world's finest, and harbors great jealousy to his infant brother who gets to feed on them - and his visions of the townspeoples's busts are hilarious. So, too, is his sincere but incomplete understanding of the adult world. I'm not sure what I was expecting after the first 15 minutes of the movie, but it certainly wasn't a magic realist portrait of a nomadic French dancer and her desperate boyfriend living in a trailer on the beach.
The movie's other redeeming quality - and it also occurs in the first 15 minutes - is the wonderfully shot scenes of Castellers in what appears to be Barcelona's Plaça San Jaume. The pinya, the enxaneta , and the manilles were all on full display.
Also, La Teta i la Lluna is in Catalan!
9-year old Tete is obsessed with breasts and goes on a personal mission to find the perfect pair of lactating breasts to feed on. A French dancer attracts his attention, but he must compete with her boyfriend and a neighborhood pretender. While playfully suggesting that Tete has a real chance of attracting a grown woman (to do what?), the film eventually recognizes that he's only a 9-year-old, and things are not really the way he sees them.
Rarely is one so dissapointed with a full book after being enamored with the first chapter, but such is the case with La Teta i la Lluna. Tete's inner monologue about breasts - he regards his mother's to be the world's finest, and harbors great jealousy to his infant brother who gets to feed on them - and his visions of the townspeoples's busts are hilarious. So, too, is his sincere but incomplete understanding of the adult world. I'm not sure what I was expecting after the first 15 minutes of the movie, but it certainly wasn't a magic realist portrait of a nomadic French dancer and her desperate boyfriend living in a trailer on the beach.
The movie's other redeeming quality - and it also occurs in the first 15 minutes - is the wonderfully shot scenes of Castellers in what appears to be Barcelona's Plaça San Jaume. The pinya, the enxaneta , and the manilles were all on full display.
Also, La Teta i la Lluna is in Catalan!
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