Your diary date if set and watched status for this film will remain publicly visible if you change the privacy level of this entry. Add members to your Close Friends from their profile. Set your account default in Settings. Directed by Bigas Luna. A disturbed middle-aged man is obsessed by a dancer and prostitute and abducts her, with tragic consequences. Catalan Spanish. Drama Thriller. Only Bigas Luna would attempt a national allegory from the story of a psychopath stalking a stripper.
So many perverse point of view shots. It is like a iberic DePalma, only more evil. So much alluring beauty to go with cruelty. An incredibly dank, pessimistic film that tracks a stalker as his obsession β a hooker named Bilbao β engulfs his every waking thought. The majority of what we hear is a repetitive, interior monologue that is meant to both shock and bore the viewer.
Delivered in a relentless monotone, we're made privy to a laundry list of feelings, sexual fantasies, and paranoias. And what we get to see, which includes the slaughtering of pigs and a bound woman's privates shaved for five minutes with an electric razor, is brutally grotesque.
It's as though director Bigas Luna wanted to get revenge on all of Spain's censors with a single work. After nearly four decades of sanitized picture making, all having to parrot Franco's imposed morality, this lunacy seems to have been the price. A representation of survival in the musty upper class where no matter what they do they always have someone behind them to get them out of trouble and repeat the same thing again as if nothing had happened.
In Bilbao Lugas builds everything around sleaze in a detailed way, using voice-over monotonically it is impossible not to think of Taxi Driver and creating an atmosphere that reminds me of that which is breathed in later currents of Asian cinema which is what led me to rewatch.
