Jamon Jamon (1992)

In a small town dominated by its pig farms and underwear factory it's not surprising that the rich son of the factory owner would be dating Silvia, eldest daughter of a woman who turned to prostitution after her drunk husband left her to raise 3 children, and the most beautiful girl in town*. When Silvia becomes pregnant Jose promises to marry her, but there is no way his mother is going to let a whore's daughter into the family so she hires the well endowed and supremely self confident Raul to seduce Silvia away from her son.

* It's Penelope Cruz, so you could substitute "world" here without telling a lie.

Bigas Luna's study of masculinity and femininity explores the confusions and emotions of coming of age in a small, isolated community, the power disparity between the owner class and the worker class, and the volatile power wielded by those endowed with youth and beauty. It tells a lurid tale of lust and jealousy, centred around Penélope Cruz's flowering into a woman whose uncommon beauty readily incites both. This was the film that introduced the world to Cruz, for which we are eternally grateful.

Javier Bardem plays the masculine mirror to Cruz's femininity, all swagger and raw physicality, the kind of man who will fight a bull in the nude just to prove who has the bigger cojones. The two of them are matter and antimatter, opposite charges whose inevitable attraction guarantees destruction.

The carnal story is both absurd and tragic, exposing humanity's animal roots and the thin veneer that society attempts to conceal them with. Penned in by their environment, propelled by the passions of youth, the characters are thrust into conflict by the yearn to escape the shackles of their origins, tossed into a cauldron too small to contain the heat that pours out of them.