Bambola (1996)

Undescribable Perfection

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Very bad, old fashioned film about sexual obsession, by every now and then very bad Spanish director Bigas Luna, and very badly acted by Cuban Jorge Perugorría as usual, who should take new voice lessons. It looks and feels like a movie from the 1970s with Teresa Ann Savoy, heavy breathing and a silly story line... but without the benefits of Miss Savoy and the passing of time. A couple of months before this I saw "The Mill on the Po", "Bitter Rice", and "Lure of the Sila", three 1949 Italian films that took place in the Po valley -also featured in Antonioni's "The Cry" (1957)-, old relics with heavy sexual tension and everybody with their clothes on, that Bigas Luna should have seen.

This movie is so great, Bigas shows you how this common woman falls in love with this kind of masochism. Love it...don't want to spoil it for you guys, but is a movie of love and eroticism, if you like Bigas you would like this. The photography is beautiful, and the acting of the Bambolina more. For me the scenery was very real, anyone can find themselves falling for the masochism. I also love the brother, sister relationship, and when she finally meets her love. Bigas makes the unerotic, erotic, you find yourself deep into the movie wanting to experience what the Bambolina is experimenting with, this movie just seduce you

.........I chanced across a Bigas Luna riding the sexual utopia of anything goes – and probably went. Fixations have never been a good idea in any direction, and if erotism is the crowning thorn in the exaltation of the most sublime that can be put on celluloid, as far as this Catalonian director is concerned, one might understand why I would rather give up the ghost. Having already been blessed with such titles as `Volavérunt' (1999) (qv), `La Femme du Titanic' (La Camerera del Titanic) (1997) and `Las Edades de Lulú' (1990) (qv) among others, I did not expect anything constructive cinematographically from `Bambola'. And I was right.More Italian than anything else, the story has nothing to offer any different from any other third-rate film based on sexual exploits coming out of Hollywood or anywhere else, such as those put on late at night on Saturday. It is obvious, watching any of Bigas Luna's films, that he has great talent, but if he is only able to focus on sexual adventures and fantasies, my suggestion is that he do something else. He seems to pick on dubious literature of a sexual fantasy nature, by rather poor writers – Almudena Grandes is the most notorious example – and seek to convert them into films: the result is mostly vulgar with very poor taste. I hope he never embarks on his version of Marguerite Duras´ novel `L'Amant', of which we already have a deplorable version (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1991).`Bámbola' is nothing more than a modern attempt at some kind of story as lived by young Italians trying to grow up with their sexual awareness being aroused. So if you like actors breathing heavily as the camera creeps around at different angles of lovers' bodies, naked or only partially, you just might find something invigorating in this film. I did not: my intellectual level is a little above that of a pervert. Sorry, Señor Bigas Luna: I do not like your films, though I must admit you do have talent and ideas, concepts and visualizations for making films – it is just that, as far as I am concerned, you've gone up a dead-end street/cul-de-sac/calle sin salida.You need not bother with `Bámbola', but if you insist on a Bigas Luna film, try `Volavérunt', which, I must say, did not greatly please me, but at least it clambered out of the foaming pool of idiocy, which `Bámbola' did not. Two out of ten, because, as usual in Bigas Luna's films, the photography is very good.

This movie could pretty well be described as the weakest, less inspired work of Bigas Luna in the last few years. All the freshness, irony, and visual appeal of "Jamon, Jamon" is missing, unfortunately replaced by a direction more focused on the "shock factor" than on creating a more solid structure.As far a "values" go, the movie contains some disturbingly twisted messages that most people could find indeed offensive. I seriously doubt any victim could fall so deeply in love with her cruel torturer, as Bambola does. From that point on, the movie loses all credibility, and everything starts going downhill. Bigas Luna pretends to shock you with a display of disturbing imagery and disturbed characters, but in the process forgets how to make the movie consistent. A wasted opportunity.