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 quirky
characterizations and obsessions one might find in a Peter Greenaway movie, with a leading man
who has to have a woman of precisely the correct weight, and gets off on drawing
specific geometric patterns on his women.
I know that all of those things don't really go together, but Mr. Luna does not know that, which
is what makes him a unique and oftentimes fascinating 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 the daughter (Maria de Medieros) of a big-time banker
who can help his career. You'd think his
world would start to collapse when his wife and mistress find out about the
various 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 that he has reached his apex, 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 robust 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, drawn-out karaoke to
a Julio Iglesias song, a surrealistic dream sequence, fey men prancing about in
small bathing suits, and all sorts of obsessive talks about Rolex watches,
smells, and women's precise weights.
There's plenty of symbolism playing on the whole correlation between his erections
and his ... other erections, but it's so subtle that you might not be able to
pick up on it without a Ph.D. in literature. See if you can spot the subtle link between the two
in the frame below:
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.
