Lucía y el sexo

(8/10) Refreshing, delightful, sexy. moving and thought-provoking movie from Spain. Not really porn (as the title might suggest) although there is some very artistic explicitness. It is movies like this one that remind us that European cinema can scale the emotional dilemmas and mountains of a story where other films look at a storyline in terms of physical developments. Lucia, a young waitress in Madrid, falls completely in love with a writer. After a period of blissful togetherness, something from his past pulls him in two directions. We are caught up in his moral dilemma, of not wanting to lose the wonderful gift he has found and yet not wanting to be untrue to himself. The semi-autobiographical novel he is writing pulls together the story and the emotions and hopes of the characters and introduces ideas that enable them to heal some of their hurt. A central idea is that of finding a hole (symbolically on the sandy beach) where, after reaching the end of the story, you can jump back into the middle. That way you can try an make things turn out better ("If you give me time", says Lorenzo, Lucia's boyfriend.) A more mature and rounded work than the Director's earlier "Lovers of the Arctic Circle", Sex and Lucia combines wonderful acting, a great story, innovative cinema and spine-tingly beautiful photography. One of my favourite films of the year.

Stories told in a so-called "magical realism" style like this film can be very tricky. The story and the characters need to be very strong to sustain all the twists of the plot and I don't think this was pulled off here. I was disappointed, as I'd enjoyed Medem's previous film Los Amantes del Circulo Polar, where the passionate love story seemed a lot more genuine and the tragic ending seemed to fit better with the theme of fate playing with people's lives than Lucia y el sexo's tragic-to-happy contortions.

Also, while the female characters were all charming and sexy, the male roles were really poor and unconvincing. What on earth did Lucia see in Lorenzo? There isn't enough to justify her endurance and patience with him. Their whole love story seems artificial from the inception, it seems there was too much work on the symbolism of their relationship - the tormented writer and storyteller, the reader and savior (Lucia as a ray of sunshine) - rather than on the real intensity of feeling between two people. The sex scenes are too stylish and sleek to be really passionate. Everyone is good looking and well dressed, they live in nice apartments, exist in a bubble where the society around them doesn't seem to affect them, this is obviously purposefully so and ideally you wouldn't mind that lack of realism if the story was engrossing enough, which it isn't.

The entire plot seems to revolve around the concept of the ability to deal with tragic fateful events by rewriting, literally and metaphorically, one's own life story. But the final optimism comes across as too artificial. The plot does not resolve the fate of the child Luna, Lorenzo's daughter. The tragedies seem more like a prop, a trick to demonstrate how love can conquer guilt, remorse and failure. They're not given enough weight. People slash their wrists or throw themselves under buses easier than they cry, then we're supposed to believe they can just forget and forgive and live happily ever after.

The director says he wanted to make everything "light" in this film, after the experience with the previous one. But I think he overdid it! There is a bit too much of the French 'Amelie' in Lucia's character, she is more like a beautiful fairy than a real person. Elena, too, is more a symbol of caring and nurturing (motherhood, cooking, taking care of Lucia) than a real grieving mother. Her lack of anger and bitterness is not very believable. The whole escapist symbol of the floating island becomes annoying after a while. It functions on the characters like a drug inducing apathy and oblivion, more of a way of avoiding pain than confronting it. But it's not that, it's the way in which it's presented and wrapped up at the end that really disappoints - too fancy and too abstract to really work.

It's not a bad film. It's full of eye candy - the spectacularly gorgeous Paz Vegas, the island, the photography - and it is well directed and well acted overall. But without all that, the story itself wouldn't really be worth much.

This Spanish film has an unusual look and feel and dares to take chances in the way that it mixes fantasy and reality. The result is an interesting film, which is often confusing and frustrating. I'm sure that this was not entirely accidental and that the filmmakers wanted to keep the audience in a state of disorientation. Nevertheless, the convolutions of the story appear to serve no other purpose than to keep us off balance.

The films biggest sin is the scene in the middle of the film where the daughter Luna opens the bedroom door. The following event is presented in such a way that we are left guessing as to what has just happened. There's no reason for withholding it, except the misguided idea that lack of clarity is artistically valuable. I think that despite it's flaws, this film shows a great vibrancy and energy.

People talk a lot about the sex scenes. The film doesn't have much to say about sex and it certainly isn't about sex. Nevertheless, the scenes do not seem tacked on for the sake of it and, in an era when Hollywood seems to be gripped by a new puritanism, it's refreshing to see a frank depiction of what is, after all, an important aspect of the relationship between these characters.

This movie in my view is not understandable without any notion of the 'soul', whose movements are made visible by magnificent underwater shots. The sexual scenery functions not only as entrance to the story; I think Medem really wanted to depict something like 'the ultimate sex' both as experience and as ultimate, divine ideal, something like Goethes 'eternal feminine.' As something to strive for, it can deeply affect our lives by giving it the splendour we need to keep it worthwhile, even if we fail. At the same time, it is also a power deep down, a dark shadow that haunts us. It's for us to see, to accept, and to decide: do we want to go to our island and unite the two, as Lucia does? In that case, we might see that in the end our stories come true as well, be it by breaking in in the middle.

The question I asked myself after watching the movie for the third time was: where exactly is this 'middle' of it? It seems to me that it's around the scene where Elena is walking through Madrid with Luna in her baby carriage, while passing the apartment of Lucia and Lorenzo. From then on, the decisions made by the novelist - like the shivery death of his child - are such that there is no way back. Lorenzo, Lucia and their relationship are too heavily shaken up. Both have to get into a new reality which can transform their personalities; to both, this means a form of dying and leaving their old personalities behind. They surely resist this, especially Lorenzo; but also he has to put himself at risk, following the demands of his 'blood', that is, of his sex, death and rebirth. And there the story takes over the initiative from the writer, who himself is thrown into it - in the middle, where he leaves his home and runs into his 'accident'. Exactly that scene is not shown - it's the hole in the middle, through which the old reality passes into the new.

For me, this movie is a small masterpiece, which shows how film and literature can work together, and how more powerful ideas about ourselves are then the circumstances we are put into. The 'form' of the persons is therefore changeable: like Lorenzo during the last Island episode has 'changed' into Carlos. As the 'transformed' Lorenzo turns up on the island, with his distress and his love for both Elena and Lucia, 'Carlos' is no longer necessary and the women can leave him behind. The fact that Elena is eventually able to weep, marks the acceptance of her loss, which 'naturally' returns her child to her from the middle of the picture again.

. . .and it's not really even about Lucia! Lucia y el Sexo is actually about Lorenzo, Lucia's novelist boyfriend, and the consequences of a sexual encounter he had in the past which has led to a catastrophic event in his life. It's a languid and tempestuous poem of a movie, told in a non-linear way by the extremely ambitious Julio Medem.

As a novelist myself, I deeply related to Lorenzo's blurring of reality and imagination. Your characters MUST be real to you in order for them to live and breathe on the page, and so much of your own life goes into the characters that the lines of course do blur. And then there's the subconscious, which cannot differentiate between fantasy and reality. Medem understands all this very well, and his depiction of it is remarkable.

The title, I believe, refers to Lorenzo's past (The Sex and what happened as a result of it), and his present (Lucia). Paz Vega and Tristan Ulloa are stunning as the two leads - Vega with her fierce intelligence and Ulloa with his tormented vulnerability. I would have given this film a 10 if it hadn't been for the fact that the most pivotal scene is shot in an incredibly vague manner, which left me confused as to what had actually happened until much later in the movie, but it is a brilliant and heartfelt experience nonetheless.