Lucía, Lucía

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.

(2003) Lucia, Lucia/ La hija del caníbal (In Spanish with English subtitles) THRILLER

Adapted from the novel by Rosa Montero, co-written and directed by Antonio Serrano involving a middle age wife Lucia (Cecilia Roth) who has learned that her husband has been kidnapped with a huge demand she unknowingly knew nothing about. And as the movie progresses the husband's kidnapping unfolds Lucia welcomes two tenants of Felix (Carlos Álvarez-Nóvoa) and Adrian (Kuno Becker) into the mystery as well as the money.

Intriguing and baffling with some twists and unexpected turns some of the moments between Lucia and her three leads is similar to the average Pedro Aldomovar movie.

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.

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.

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.