Sound of the Sea

(Son de mar, Bigas Luna, Spain, 2001)

On the 10th anniversary of the death of Bigas Luna (1946-2013), a Spanish television channel ran a double bill of his works, accompanied by a panel discussion with an actor, a friend, a fan and a film critic. At the end of the chat, the actor, the friend and the fan were all enthusiastically asked about their “next projects” soon to appear in the world. The film critic was unceremoniously left out of this survey. Presumably, her next project was assumed to be simply reviewing some more movies. What a profession!

The films screened that night on TV were the extravagant European co-production The Chambermaid on the Titanic (1997), and the more modest but no less Luna-esque Sound of the Sea. The latter, which I had neither seen nor heard of before, comes with intriguing collaborators: a script by Rafael Azcona (who worked extensively with Marco Ferreri, Carlos Saura and others) from a novel by the prolific Manuel Vicent; Leonor Watling and Jordi Mollà in the main roles. It’s actually Luna’s third-last feature.

It's a little surprising to me that Luna has yet to be rediscovered by the ‘Euro Cult’ crowd of 21^st century DVD fandom. Walerian Borowczyk, Jean Rollin and even Miklós Jancsó have made that grade, so what’s stopping the hasty adoption of Bigas? It’s pleasing to think that his artistic sensibility may be too lumpy a handful for those self-styled connoisseurs of the transgressive.

When it comes to my own fragmented familiarity with Luna’s career, I have a tale to tell that is, in fact, quite similar to the one we frequently hear, in one variant or another, from the New Cultists.

The VHS culture of the 1980s in Australia brought certain remarkable films of Luna’s to my attention, those that flirted with English language co-production set-ups: the weird religious drama of Reborn (1984) starring Dennis Hopper, and the amazing meta-horror-set-in-a-cinema special, Anguish (1987). Associates who were keyed into the less legal bounty of Italian-language video shops emerged happy with The Ages of Lulu (1990). Then the mainstream arthouses briefly took the relay, with the global hit Jamón Jamón (1992).

Eventually Australia’s ‘multicultural’ TV channel SBS, in its better days, picked up the slack and provided access to a steady stream of most of the rest of Luna’s ‘90s films, including Golden Balls (1993), The Tit and the Moon (1994, among his best) and Volavérunt (1999), the last of which continued on the path of his big Titanic project. By then, Luna was firmly associated, in the Anglo movie-mind, with a handful of stars like Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, as well as (for cinephiles) collaborators including cinematographer José Luis Alcaine (veteran of Víctor Erice and Brian De Palma projects). On this plane of fame, Luna was, alas, soon be eclipsed by Pedro Almodóvar (who got Alcaine on board – and he’s still there in his mid 80s).

But there was more – a lot more – to be uncovered about Bigas Luna. When I travelled to Spain in 1994, I found myself mocked by the organisers of the Madrid Week of Experimental Cinema for even mentioning his name in mixed company. What clichéd, mainstream, ‘global export’ trash! Thirteen years later, at the Las Palmas Film Festival, a local expert clued me in, sotto voce, to the more experimental-surrealist beginnings of his filmography, with Bilbao (1978) and Caniche (1979) – and this period cracked entry into Caimán magazine’s 2016 poll (in which I voted) of the all-time-greatest Spanish cinema. Then there was his vast, uninterrupted career as a plastician in the visual arts: painting, sculpture, video. There was even a reputed ‘posthumous’ movie that he helped write (Second Origin, 2015) and a further quasi-auto-portrait compilation, Bigas x Bigas (2016).

When I landed in Spain on subsequent visits – eventually, to stay for good – I quickly realised that Luna was also an ubiquitous figure on popular TV: constantly interviewed in endlessly replayed video-bites about this or that aspect of the ‘Spanish character’ or the national soul. And here was situated the central paradox of Bigas Luna as celebrity artist: he constantly satirised, with enormous vigour, the various stereotypes of Spanishness (especially machismo), but just as vigorously espoused them. Or so it seemed to me.

Indeed, the 2023 televisual tribute hit straight off the bat with the assertion (backed up by interview clips) that Life in Spain was, for Luna, primarily “food and sex”. And those preoccupations shaped not only his lifestyle (like gourmet Claude Chabrol, he liked to shoot where were good restaurants and a notable local cuisine) and his media image, but also the substance of his film art. All that can be fairly reasonably tied (as Spanish journalists love to do) with the legacy of Luis Buñuel – but not so comfortably allied with quotations from Bataille & co., as the Cultists prefer to be able to do with their giallo-and-other faves.

Sound of the Sea is a strange fish. Like several other Luna films, it comes over as a recipe: in this case, the ingredients are Greek mythology, sex (of the amour fou variety), a noir narrative element, and poetry … a few slabs of it, recited repeatedly, and especially during the Act of Love. Indeed, a sparkling passage from Virgil’s Aeneid (“two serpents surface” … ) is enough to bring young Martina (Watling) to multiple orgasm in mere seconds. Good for her! In a recollection of Valerio Zurlini’s splendid La prima notte de quiete (1972) starring Alain Delon, Martina’s main guy, Ulises (Mollà), starts off as an idealistic substitute-teacher of literature to teenagers, rattling off prime verses by Constantin Cavafy. Secondary school was never like that for me.

Yes, you read that right: Ulises/Ulysses. This is where the Myth template is heavily overlaid on the action. The plot is deliberately simple and scarce: after the build-up and first ecstasies of love – pregnancy occurs instantly – the arrival of domesticity and financial obligation derail happiness. One day Ulises takes a boat … and disappears, presumed to have died at sea. Here the noir bit intervenes: Martina resigns herself to a loveless union (cue ‘horrific’ sex scene, sans poetry recital) to wealthy businessman/operator Sierra (Eduard Fernández).

But, one day, Ulises suddenly reappears: he had washed up somewhere in Portugal, only to learn, in his far-away solitude, how much he truly loves and needs Martina … So, the amour fou is on again (hidden on the top floor of some real estate owned by the hubby), until the private detectives and burly henchmen get on the case, and the couple’s ultimate flight out to sea in a boat (named Son de mar) is set to be sabotaged …

In the end as in the beginning, sea waves are superimposed on the big, dramatic scenes, as poetry fills the soundtrack, and music (scored by UK outfit Piano Magic) soars. Faces in close-up ecstasy … or lingering hero-POV shots of Martina’s underwear hanging on a clothesline, as we see early on in proceedings. Subtlety is not Luna’s strategy: he pounds his auteur-brand moves, fetish-objects and image-symbols more relentlessly than even Steven Spielberg or Baz Luhrmann. Federico Fellini managed this type of game with more aplomb.

In comparison with Sound of the Sea, The Tit and the Moon is a better serve of a similar weave of ingredients. Anyhow, everything in Luna looks richer and more intriguing when viewed through the wider lens of his total œuvre.

© Adrian Martin 5 April 2023