VACAS

VACAS (Directed by Julio Medem. Starring Emma Suarez, Carmelo Gomez, Ann Torrent)

WHAT ARE the Spanish putting in their food? From the ham obsession of Bigas Luna's recent surreal melodrama Jamon Jamon we shift our attention to cows and a director who may well be suffering from some creative form of bovine encephalitis.

Cows is the literal translation of the title of Spanish film critic Medem's directorial debut and though the meat of the matter is much the same as traditional Spanish fare - family feuds, macho exhibition, illicit passion, a touch of incest it is all viewed from a curious perspective, even at times through the eyes of the cows that not only provide the village with its economic well-being but appear to keep a watchful, omnipresent, implacably unjudgemental eye on at least one of the central characters.

In other hands Vacas might lean towards a historical epic. Through four interlinked stories it traces the fortunes of two rival Spanish families from one civil war (in 1875) to another (1936). But Medem shows little interest in his plot, leaping through history with fast-cut impatience and turning his eye and his camera to the surrealist margins of a story that soon takes on the dimensions of a fairy tale - albeit a disturbingly brutal, dedicatedly adult one. (What it all means is anyone's guess but Medem milks his imagery for all it is worth.) Hurtling into the eye of a cow and taking us spinning through its brain, Vacas has a madness all of its own.