Lucía, Lucía

Antonio Serrano has to be commended in bringing this film to the screen. Unfortunately, the finished product leaves a lot to be desired. The script based on Rosa Montero's novel, The Daughter of the Cannibal, turns out to be an enigma with a lot of questions not being answered.

Cecilia Roth makes this film comes alive. She is the only thing going for this strange tale of deceit that, at times, doesn't make a lot of sense. Ms Roth is the only excuse for seeing this uneven movie.

The underlying theme is how greed affects innocent people. Also, how Lucia's marriage of more than ten years has been a sham. Ramon, her missing husband, obviously, can't perform in the sack. Cecilia is a very unfulfilled woman until the 'hunky' Felix comes into the picture and is able to get some life out this woman. Felix awakes feelings within Lucia she didn'n know she had, but alas, it's too late for her to undergo another relationship, with Felix, or anyone else.

This film kept reminding this viewer of another, and better Mexican film, "Y tu mama tambien", in that there's is a trio embarked in a quest along the Mexican highways. Lucia, Lucia, never achieves the magic of that other picture, but it's a very nice effort, which keeps the viewer hoping it will get there as well.

I avoided seeing this movie for a long time, simply because I was tired of being let down by bad mexican cinema. After seeing the huge marketing campaign behind it and noticing that it had the same director/writer of Sexo, Pudor Y Lagrimas, I decided to give it a shot. Big mistake, this is a mess of a movie, the plot, the dialogue, the paper thin characters. Not one of the elements that made Sexo, Pudor Y lagrimas translated, the only thing that remained were the preachy monologues and overall pretentiousness.

Cecilia Roth (Almodovar's All About My Mother, Dark Habits) is an older woman whose husband mysteriously disappears in an airport when they are travelling to Rio. She finds he has 20 million pesos in his safe deposit box to pay ransom.

With Felix (Carlos Álvarez-Nóvoa) at her side, she manages to try and find out what happened to her husband. She also enlists the aid of young Adrian (Kuno Becker) in the adventure. The three of them are certainly worth watching.

Felix is an old leftist who is handy with a gun, and Adrian is looking for some fun with a woman almost twice his age. She definitely doesn't look bad for that age either! It would be helpful to be more versed in Mexican politics to enjoy this.

Wasn't this supposed to be the summer of only dumb sequels for teenagers?

So what a surprise that we have a virtual trilogy of intelligent foreign films about women of a certain age with strong, sexy imaginations and time on their hands to meet up with unexpected strangers, in "Swimming Pool" then "Friday Night (Vendredi Soir)" and now "Lucia, Lucia (La Hija del canibal)."

"Lucia" is unexpectedly the funniest of the three, a delightfully wry black comedy with twists on expectations that the storyteller turns on herself constantly as she bonds in an odd three-some with her neighbors, an elderly ex-revolutionary and a young hunk.

While based on a novel, it seems like a gender/generational response to the Mexican teen-age road movie "Y Tu Mama Tambien," in the classic tradition of women's response songs to hits (as in "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels"), complete with a country line dance scene as a relaxing break from political intrigue and marital secrets exposed while Lucia searches for her kidnapped husband -- and herself.

One of the running jokes is how the older generations can still surprise the young 'uns.

Writers are driving me crazy: In `Adaptation' Nicolas Cage was barely sane struggling with his inspiration and incendiary companions, true or otherwise; in `Swimming Pool,' Charlotte Rampling created a plausible fiction of a dangerous female border and Rampling's desire to make real the murders she wrote.

Antonio Serrano's `Lucia, Lucia' is set in Mexico with a children's writer, Lucia (Cecilia Roth from Almodovar's `All about My Mother'), admitting in voiceover her fictions about her life, establishing herself as an unreliable narrator about the kidnapping of her husband, her attempts to recover him, an affair with a younger man, and a friendship with an older man. Initially I was put off by her lies because a mystery needs a reliable narrator, but as I accepted her creative effort to describe the middle-aged crisis through these fictions, I settled into an aesthetic trance that sees clearly the symbolism of each character relating to her changes of life. Her observation that heaven must be a moment of sex frozen in time is one of the interesting insights these varied experiences brought to her.

Involved in the kidnapping is a rebel gang patterned after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) prominent about 30 years ago in Mexico. This plot to deliver the ransom money to the gang is so complicated that even the playful plots of `Y Tu mama Tambien' and `Amores Perros' seem simple by contrast. The inclusion of a corrupt government in the kidnapping is confusing and certainly adds no allegorical insight given the historically corrupt governments of Mexico.

The Spanish version of this film is called `The Cannibal's Daughter,' a much more daring and figuratively descriptive title for Lucia's consuming life. Actually, her actor father once played a cannibal and mother sees marriage as sharing life with the living dead. It's easy to see why Lucia questions her marriage and warily enters into relationships with the passionate young man and politically-romantic older man. At the least in her story, she is experiencing what the bard predicted when he said of middle age:

`Thou hast nor youth, nor age, But as it were an after-dinner's sleep Dreaming on both.'

In the end, the story turns nicely on the evolution of a soul who accepts life and her place in it as a writer whose imagination helps her find peace. The men may lose her, but she finds herself.