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Rating: Bigas Luna: They Called Him Bilbao -1978-
In his second attempt, the then thirty-year-old Catalan painter and director Bigas Luna reacted to the flop of his first film with this dark, hallucinated, and sad gem, featuring the right actors and possessing a sick beauty of its own. The protagonist is a certain Leo, a man and eternal boy, a gloomy urban loafer, who psychically overflows into his erotic fantasies for a stripper prostitute, Bilbao. The landscapes of Barcelona that the film describes, the sparse, obsessive photography, seem akin to many European capitals: Leo is a kind of metropolitan vampire, a man of the crowd like the one in Poe's story, wandering the city without a destination, carrying with him dark ghosts of private life-the aunt he lives with, with whom he has a complex relationship of sexual servitude, unresolved Oedipal complexes where love - hate and opportunism converge - things have happened - says Leo to make it brief with a monotonous voice-over, which makes his alienated personal diary even more vivid in a crescendo of Psicopatologia Sexualis.
Leo is somewhat a dark and sick 70s mix of Thomas from Blow Up and Leopoldo from I Vitelloni in his bachelor room, spending nights pondering the characters of the comedies: as a spectator, he masturbates to a super 8 hard film, always with the sequence of the hairdryer on the actress's vulva; as a budding director, he photographs pieces of reality trying thus to stop the deafening flow of megacities: he finds well-being from the solarium in the neon lights of the metro, he feels alive among the crowd. With his camera, he becomes the director of his monotonous life and his psycho-film; obsessed with details, and clean teeth, in a sort of magical rite that only the third eye of the camera can reveal to him, he sees in his photos the erotic fantasies realized, one detail after the other, indeed they reveal to him the possible reality of his insane plan: to have the dark and sensual Bilbao all to himself, twirling in the ether, with loose hair and pubic hair shaved by him personally.
The fiat lux will be the IFEELOVE striptease of Bilbao and the blowjob she then gives him as a client; he will photograph a fish with a sausage in its mouth to relive that coupling. He will also find the right soundtrack, discovering in a vast record store a song titled Bilbao, which will become his new daily soundtrack instead of the usual oriental chant that looped all night on the old turntable. From depressive syndrome to fetishism, to monomania, to sexual morbidity, our hero confidently sets on the path to schizophrenia and, now sure of himself, spies on Bilbao even in her intimate life with her pimp, and finally drugs and kidnaps her, using her as his sexual toy. During these orgasmic phases of his personal theatre, the girl hits her head and dies; the toy is broken. Leo is as shocked as a child, but the burly aunt helps him hide the body so he can return to his usual life and search for another Bilbao. Virulent, necrophilic, and repulsive, this film through eros examines common inner states in today's man, with all the possible psychotic deviations from creative solitude.
The same opiate deviations that Poe spoke of 2 centuries ago: Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.(My companions told me that if I visited the tomb of the friend, my pains would be somewhat eased")
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