AKA Numbered Days
The Spanish “Running Out of Time,” “Días contados” (1994; there is also a 1999 Hong Kong one that I like better; “Numbered Days” is a more literal translation of “Días contados”) to have been made to show Ruth Gabriel’s body. Except for the bottom of her feet and the top of her head, all of it is displayed. In some scenes she is topless, in others bottomless, and is completely nude for extended stretches of the movie. Her character, Charo, is a heroin user who is not quite addicted and a sex worker who is not quite a prostitute. She is mostly an erotic dancer, while her nymphomaniac friend Vanessa (Candela Peña) provides the blow jobs.
The protagonist, Antonio (Carmelo Gómez [El portero] with a constant 3-day stubble) is a Basque (ETA) terrorist, come to Madrid to blow up a police station. He occupies the apartment next to Charo, who soon shoots up, takes a bath, and poses for photographs in his bathroom.
Antonio does not seem to believe in what he does (kill Spanish policemen, blow up things in the name of Basque independence), but has some interest in sex, albeit with sex workers rather than with his terrorist colleague and former bedmate Lourdes (Elvira Mínguez [Tapas, Pudor]).
Antonio’s nihilism (no doubt, he is supposed to be numbed by violence by and against ETA) and the look of the rundown Madrid neighborhood seem right out of a Luc Besson movie, “Léon, the Professional” for instance, though Charo is older and far more jaded than Natalie Portman’s character in “Léon.”
Javier Bardem is on hand as a very creepy pimp and police informer and heroin addict with rotted teeth. Aptly, he is called Lisardo. And there is a dealer called Portugues (Chacho Carreras) who endures more unpleasantness than he is shown providing.
This scene from “Dias contados” (1994) starts in a bathroom. There you can see nude Ruth Gabriel, Candela Pena, Elvira Minguez, Gloria Sirvent. Then that hot beauty had a very passionate sex. And in the end of the scene Ruth was being fucked hard in front of her man.
