Die Titte und der Mond

"In the beginning was the breast." -Marilyn Yalom. For the nine year old Teté (Biel Durán) breasts mean milk and milk means love. As his mother's maternal affections and breast milk turn to his newborn baby brother, Teté invokes the moon to bring him a breast of his own in this surreal coming of age comedy by one of Spain's greatest and most controversial auteurs, Bigas Luna.

'The Tit and the Moon' (La teta y la luna) first released in 1994, entered the competition at the 51st Venice International Film Festival. It follows Jamón Jamón and Golden Balls in Luna's 'Iberian passion trilogy' that won him international acclaim; yet remains the least talked about and most underrated film in the trilogy. It's also its warmest and most gentle entry.

In many ways Teté remains merely a spectator in his own story, a voyeur and narrator. His quest for finding his own set of breasts seems doomed from the beginning, Tete is too old to be breast fed and too young to be sexually active.

While this is most certainly the tale of his sexual awakening, Tete desires often to come over as asexual and naive. He seems to make no separation between his mother and other women and merely wants to reclaim his birth-right that has been unfairly robbed off with the arrival of his new brother. Tete loses himself more and more in his own fantasies and lives them out through the characters he spies on, such as flamenco singing teenage heartthrob Miguel (Miguel Poveda) and his friend the body builder Stallone (Genís Sánchez).

When the beautiful French dancer and cabaret artist Estrellita (played by Mathilda May - you might remember her best as the naked space vampire in Tobe Hooper's 'Lifeforce') arrives in town, Tete thinks his spell has worked and his prayers have been answered, but Estrellita seems well guarded by her partner (in life as well as on stage) theHarley Davidson riding elderly biker Maurice (Gérard Darmon) to whom she seems endlessly devoted.

Miguel as well soon begins to obsess over Estrellita and wants to seduce her through his Flamenco singing. While Miguel poses as yet another rival in Tete's life he also acts as a window for Tete to get closer to her.

The film touches on many of Luna's familiar themes such as virility and machismo; one scene shows strong man Stallone crack a walnut with his muscles after a workout session. The film is filled with phallic symbolism and quests of strength and conquering. This is already established in the opening scene when the villagers erect a phallic looking human tower known as castell. This Catalan tradition of building human towers dates back to the 18th century with its origins in a traditional folklore dance from the city of Valls. Tete tries to climb to the top but the tower collapses each time before he makes it to the highest point. Eventually Tete is replaced by another boy who reaches the top and is cheered by the exuberant crowd. I'm hesitant to say that the film touches on the occult or magic, but at the same time I can't help but feel that there is more to the images, themes and rituals on display, whether this is premeditated or comes from a more primal place. Male rivalry is also a central theme, while I already established Tete's envy over his younger brother's constant access to their mother's breasts; throughout the film men envy each other's women, motorcycles, singing abilities and muscles often with an underlined homoerotic desire.

Men, despite their shameless displays of machismo aren't violent gorillas, and most of them get a chance to show their sensitive side. With the exception of Stallone and Tete's father we see almost every male character cry on screen at least once.

Closeted homoerotic desires aside, the men only want one thing, breasts. On the other hand Estrellita (the only three dimensional female character in the film) has far more interesting and kinky desires, such as a fetish for smelly feet (we see her sucking on Maurice's foot before telling him it tastes like Roquefort and later she opens Miguel's boots to sniff his feet) as well as the taste of salty tears (she keeps Maurice's tears in a jar to lick them after sex). She also seems to find it romantic when her man farts for her. Farts and his motorbike don't just make him the object of desire in her eyes and envy of other men, but a star. Miguel and Estrellita's traveling act consists of her dancing ballet around him while he's sitting on his Harley before performing several circus tricks by farting loudly.

Though her grace and dance makes her the true artist on stage, she is merely perceived as a prop while the audience cheers for the man on the motorcycle setting his farts on fire. Her breast is exposed twice during their performance with her tit being treated merely as a punchline to his act.

The symbolism of the female breast has often been shaped by religious, political, and social ideas... whether they may be depicted as sacred object, symbol for life/ fertility or merely as a means of arousal or displayed for comic effect. Luna is certainly not the first to feature breasts or the act of breast-feeding in the movies, but all of these ideas and more are represented beautifully and often ironically in The Tit and the Moon. At the same time, the breast is almost a McGuffin in the film, a holy grail or a catalyst for desire, drama and milk, the magic elixir of life.

Other noteworthy and equally surreal examples of breast feeding in film would be Travis (Malcolm McDowell) being nursed back to health by a breastfeeding nun in Lindsay Anderson's 'O' Lucky Man', and Miss Monde's spiritual resurrection after being breastfed by a female member of the Vienna aktionists in Dusan Makavejev's 'Sweet Movie'.

Luna was no stranger to sex and taboo subjects, ever since he first started making films in the late 70's his work was filled with incest, sado-masochism, pathological obsession, nude bull fights, rape, machismo, meat and bestiality, often using sexual symbolism to mirror Spanish society. In Bambola several characters make liberating or destructive revelations about their own sexuality and desires after being raped. While his cold and equally poetic and horrifying masterpiece Caniche (aka Poodle) revolves around a woman's special relationship with her poodle (who goes down on her frequently) and her half-brother's frustrations of seeing the dog mount the woman he can't have, which he unleashes by mistreating and sodomizing wild dogs he keeps locked in cages before raping his sister in an explosive and bloody climax. The Ages of Lulu, an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Almudena Grandes, again featured incest as well as Bigas Luna would later note "my thing: transvestites and sadism." Much of Luna's work is often under attack for claims of sexism, homophobia and misogyny ('The Tit and the Moon' is no exception), though this would be missing the point entirely.

The Tit and the Moon deals with many similar all-consuming obsessions and sexual frustrations as his earlier films, but we never see characters downward spiral this deep into self-destruction. Compared to early shockers like Caniche and Bilbao - this is Luna light. Nor is it as sexually charged as Jamón Jamón and the Ages of Lulu or as multi-layered and ambitious as his innovative horror film Anguish (perhaps my personal favourite of his). In short, The Tit and the Moon is as "mainstream" as Luna could possibly get without losing his voice. This does not make the film's symbolic images any less powerful (and there is still plenty here for the easily offended to get all riled up about). As always Luna's trademark mix of lurid melodrama and surrealism ensures an unforgettable cinematic experience further heightened by Nicola Piovani's hypnotic score (Who also scored both of the previous entries in Luna's Iberian passion trilogy and would go on to win the Academy Award for Life is Beautiful just three years later) and stunning cinematography by Spanish master Jose Luis Alcaine (the first cinematographer to use fluorescent tubes as "key" lightning and frequent collaborator of Pedro Almodovar).

In the film's most famous and stand-out scene, Estrellita shoots milk out of her breast like an angel water fountain directly into Tete's mouth. This scene, like many others is only in Tete's fantasy world, while he never truly achieves to suckle on any real life woman's breasts. In grand bookends fashion the film ends with the building of a human tower one year later, and just like in the beginning Tete climbs the tower, only this time to make it all the way to the top.

In Bigas Lunas' final part of his 'Iberian passion trilogy', The Tit & the Moon is both a refreshingly open foray into the fantasies of the female flesh by a young boy, Tete (Biel Duan) but also one with more of a message.

In his mind, breast milk means love, as his mother's maternal affections turn totally to his baby brother. When she breast-feeds him and he nuzzles up and is content and happy - and Tete is not, Tete soon decides that what he needs from Life is a breast all to himself.

On a silvery, moonlit beach, one night, he prays for such and soon a French couple, a cabaret double act, move in locally and his fascinations and fantasies turn to her. She's (Mathilda May) a knowing and sexy sort of circus dancer - dark and seductive.

Whilst the film deals openly and slightly naughtily about sex, desire and womanly seduction, it never feels dirty or squalid, though you wouldn't make it the no. 1 choice to show to your Granny. The humour is earthy and natural, whilst as with the best of European cinema, there's that hint of fantasy and a heightened, fiery emotion.

The Tit &... is gentler and less charged than the other two of Luna's trilogy - arguably Jamon Jamon is better, Goldenballs a bit of a bad mistake and this, with its narration by the young boy, it's more akin to Cinema Paradiso. It also has a certain charm about it and in some ways, The Tit &... could be my favourite of Lunas' trilogy.

I enjoyed a lot watching this movie. It has a great direction, by the already know Bigas Luna, born in Spain. And it is precisely in Spain that the movie takes place, in Cataluña, to be more precise.

Luna explores once more the theme of an obcession, in this case the obcession of a young boy for the women's milk. There are some psychological concepts in this story such as the rejection complex that the elder son feels with the birth of his brother. In the movie this is what leads to the obcession of the young boy who suddenly sees all his mother's milk go to the recently born son. So he starts trying to find a breast who is able to feed him. He finds it in a woman recently arrived and from here on the movie is all around this.

This movie lives a lot on imagery, more than the story itself, the espectator captures certain moments (unforgettable moments) and certain symbols (the movie deserves a thourough analyses on almost everything that happens because it usually means something...). The surroundings, the landscapes, typical from the region as well as the surreal behaviors of the characters, also symbolic, and the excelent ambiguous soundtrack by Nicola Piovani transport us to another dimension, not parallel to the real world, but which intersects it from times to times... Worth living in that world, worth watching this movie, even though we may eventually and for moments get tired and a bit sick with the excessive obcession, which is perhaps taken beyond the limits...

I also enjoyed the performance of the protagonist... 8/10

I recently saw Iñárritu's most recent experiment with cinematic narrative, so I pulled this out. I've been saving it for such an occasion, where I need something from a Spanish mind that is as direct as anything in Hollywood.

But it involves two things that Hollywod just cannot seem to do: pre-adolescent wonder about sex, and genuine magical realism. I don't like the term because it is at once too broad (like "surrealism" and "irony") and at the same time usually expressed too simply. Here, the magical worlds we shift in and out of are worlds driven by lactation: one of a boy's fantasy yearning a the second of the physics of what he encounters explained through that world. And there's a third which is shared only between us as adults and the filmmaker.

That adult magical world is populated by a French couple: a young dancer played by the desirable Mathilda May and her husband who performs with her. His stage skill is farting, and he bills himself as the man of fire, appearing in fire-painted leathers and with a motorcycle as prop, both for the stage show and the film proper.

There's a magical folding of course between the show they put on, the one confabulated by the boy, the one we see in the film, and one managed by the boys' dad. In this latter case, the boy strives to be the top of a penis constructed of men. It begins the film where the boy fails and ends with him fully erect, imagining May's breasts, suckling both her's and his mother's.

The French performing farter is loosely based on a real French performer: Joseph Pujol, billed as Le Pétomane. He was the most successful entertainer in late nineteenth century France.

This film isn't Spanish at all, instead from a land called Catalonia, a quite unique land that some would say is temporarily occupied by Spain. Its a rather wonderful place which includes Barcelona. The language is more impulsive than French, more languidly sensual than Italian and far more pleasing to the ear than Spanish. It borders on France and has been influenced linguistically at least by that proximity. But just as the Brazilains make fun of the Portuguese, so the Catalons make fun of the French. You have to know that to appreciated the lack of wholeness the French couple has, plus jokes like the French loaf for a penis.

Performing: the couple performs on stage; the little boy on top of the human phallus; the older teen on the woman (and singing to her); and certain nipples produce on call.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Probably Bigas Luna's finest achievement for it achieves a delicate balance between sleaze, eroticism and surrealism. The delicious Mathilda May, who spent most of Tobe Hooper's "Lifeforce" in the buff, is the object of young Biel Duran's pre-teen lust. He can't get May's breasts out of his mind and wants so badly to suckle them and suckle the breasts of his own mother, too. His pursuit of May IS the film. As in Luna works such as "Lulu" and "Jamon! Jamon!", the director brings a slightly warped sexual sensibility to his strange but beautiful tale. The usual suspects will be offended, but those with open minds will enjoy this frothy erotic poem to the female breast. José Luis Alcaine's images are gorgeous and Nicola Piovani's score is sweet and rich. A gorgeous cinematic confection with a delightfully anarchic sensibility that the Spanish do so naturally.