Sex and Lucia

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Whenever reviewers describe a film as containing equal nudity of male and female, I worry. It generally means a full frontal male, focused upon, aroused, appeared just once or twice or so, and affecting the reviewers' sense of equilibrium. It means you must be wary of trusting anything else in the reviewers' observations. Sex and Lucia -- for some reason inverted from the Spanish Lucia y el Sexo -- is such a film. And when these same reviewers tell you that this film is confusing, it is important to remember what distracted them. Not difficult to follow, despite the odd phallus every now and again, what you see most of in Sex and Lucia is sex and Lucia (Paz Vega, looking like a taller, more tolerable, and sexier Penelope Cruz).

Which is not to say that Lucia and sex are the point of the story. Writer/ director Julio Medem is trying to say something more --something about connections and circularity, coexistence and coincidence. As in his previous film, Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Medem's focus is on a structural conceptualization of life -- there the palindrome, here the beginning and ending that fold in on the middle and start over again: twin concepts derived, it would seem, from the very structure of the filmmaker's name: Medem.

Medem likes names. And those of his characters are carefully chosen;
he takes the time, sooner or later, to comment upon them. At the
center of Sex and Lucia is Lorenzo (Tristán Ulloa), from whom we learn, in flashback (he falls victim to a tragic accident at the film's start), that his name refers to the sun. Lorenzo is an author, whose novels imitate life and whose life imitates his novels, and this serves him well (though it confused the hell out of Roger Ebert).

Around Lorenzo, carrying themselves as if his reflections, are Lucia (light), a waitress who apparently stalks him and then declares (and effectively shows) her love for him after reading his novel (the thing is, she says, your novel grabbed my heart, I am in love with you and want to live with you; okay he says, for what else can he?), Elena (light) (Najwa Nimri), a cook with whom he made passionate love and, inadvertently, a daughter, on a wondrous night in the wondrous waters off a wondrous island on his 26th birthday six years earlier (where names were never exchanged), and the daughter herself, Luna (the moon) (Silvia Llanos), who disappears into the night when the sun, her father, lets her down. All godhead references, alas, intended.

The father/sun's fall, piercing his myth, as it were, is brought about by
lust -- not the enlightened lust of love and birthday gifts, but of animal hunger and loss of control. He falls for the babysitter, Belén (arrow) (Elena Anaya), a pulsating nymphette who tells of how she wants her pornstar mother's lover for her own, and it all goes downhill from there -- to murder, disappearance or wishful abandonment.

We learn of all this first in the present time, where Lucia hears of Lorenzo's accident and takes off for his special island to forget him and to discover him -- and does discover him, through Elena, whom she meets there, and Carlos, once Antonio (Daniel Freire), lover to the mother of the babysitter. With the lighthouse -- guiding post -- always in the distance, with the sun.

Filmed digitally and appropriately in heavy-handed yet washed out sunlight, the island, a sun in itself in its way (a zoom tells us so), intersects with the film, with holes in the middle that you can fall through, climb up from, and dig your way out.

There is no comment on the film's explicit metaphor of island holes and water and the lighthouse in the distance, so I will not comment upon it here.

Medem is making a metaphyisical point. As if de rigueur, he makes the point through time shifts, character shifts, internet chat, multiple female masturbation scenes and separate narrative threads -- the omniscient present, Lucia's flashbacks to the time before, and Lorenzo's unraveling novel somewhere in the middle where the before and after meet and forever start over in both directions, as the film promises over and over again.

The film's depths prove illusory in the end -- plays of light that hint at something more that isn't there. Medem is not a subtle writer, nor a subtle director, and the actors are not asked to perform subtle tasks (though asked to perform they truly are). But each is up to his own in Sex and Lucia, and there's enough to play with that one just may find it worthy of a midnight dip.

As for myself, I still don't know. Perhaps it was all that male nudity...

©2002 Shari L. Rosenblum
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