Piggy

Grade: B-

If you have the ability to customize your audio/captions when watching a foreign language [for you] film, the obvious best way to go is the original audio with subtitles of your choice. This way, you won’t miss a word, and you get the essence and emotion from the original actors playing the moment, not recorded long after the fact by a person in a studio who wasn’t in the scene. You’ll quickly get used to reading everything at the bottom of the screen. There’s a punchline in Life Is Beautiful that lands much funnier with captions than if one was watching it dubbed in their language. Parasite is one of my favorite movies, and I can’t imagine watching it any other way.

Unfortunately, when I watched Piggy (a Spanish language film), I was stuck with an English dubbed version. Aside from their lips not matching what I was hearing, some of their voices didn’t sound like they could have come from the actor they were reading for. It only reinforced what I said above. I am giving the grade a little boost, out of benefit of the doubt. I’m sure I wasn’t getting the whole experience.

Piggy is about an overweight teen named Sara. Her parents run a meat market, which provides her peers with plenty of material for insults – in the vein of the film’s title – to hurl at Sara. One day, while swimming alone at the town pool, three girls mercilessly give her a hard time, almost drown her, then run off with her clothes and towel, leaving her to walk home dripping wet in just her two-piece bathing suit. The bullying in this scene feels so exaggerated and over-the-top, it would have felt dated in a 1980’s after school special. Do people really still bully and terrorize to that degree? I guess it’s good that I have to ask.

There was one other person at the pool – a quiet young man, unknown by anybody. During Sara’s walk of shame home, we see that he has kidnapped the girls in the back of his van. No points for guessing the color. He stops, drops off a towel for her, Sara exchanges eye contact with one of the girls through the back window, and he drives off.

Some interesting ethical questions are raised here. Why didn’t she do anything to help in the moment? Should she tell anybody? Should she help these girls who always did nothing but torment her? Maybe they really had it coming. Laura Galán gives a courageous performance. She was born in 1986, which would have made her about 35 when the movie was filmed, but convincingly plays a teenager – a minor. There is very little score. I wondered if writer/director Carlota Pereda was going for a raw, bleak I Spit On Your Grave feel. The extremely blood-soaked climax is well-filmed, and didn’t hold our hand through it. It left some ambiguity. It’s an intriguing story, and there’s something here. America likes to remake international movies. I wouldn’t mind seeing one for Piggy some time down the road.

Grade: B-