Sex And Lucia

Penetration &
Interpenetration

Sex And Lucia
aka Lucía y el sexo
Spain/France 2001
Directed by Julio Medem
Palisades Tartan DVD Region 2

Warning: Look, to try and get this one
straight in my head as I review it, I think
it’s going to have to have some spoilers...
for which I apologise.

Sex And Lucia is one of those movies I managed to miss in the cinema when it came out back in 2001. Years later I found a DVD of the movie going as part of a ‘£3 when you buy something else’ offer in Fopp records and now, a few years after even that, I’ve finally caught up with the film, not realising I’m not entirely unfamiliar with this director’s work, actually... although, barring one other, I haven’t seen much else by this director since the 1990s.

The film sets things up with an uncomfortable telephone conversation between Lucia and her long term lover, a published but tormented writer, as she is trying to balance her waitressing job while fearing for his life through an act of suicide on the other end of the line. When she gets home she discovers him gone, a half heard phone call from the police confirms her suspicions that he is dead. Then she goes to an island that  he always loved, to come to terms with what’s happened but then starts to travel back in her mind to how she met him and we start to see a series of narratives around the writer, his fictionalised (or is it) account of the narratives and the various women in his life who weave in and out of the story.

The writer is Lorenzo, played by Tristán Ulloa. The four women... well, three women and one little girl... are Lucia (played by Paz Vega), Elena (played by Najwa Nimri), Belen (played by Elena Anaya... who I knew from Wonder Woman, reviewed here and this director’s own Room In Rome, reviewed here) and Lorenzo’s young daughter Luna (played by Silvia Llanos), who he only meets for the first time quite a while into the narrative.

The film is a beautiful example of different interpenetrating story lines, as each of the narratives which you are watching cross cut in the most bizarrely coincidental of ways until, by the end, you realise that even though most of them don’t know it until they’re at the finishing post, that everyone in the narrative is actually connected to each other as the story strands transcend the audience’s initial perceptions of how the time settings of each tale are playing out. It’s a deliberately chopped and fragmented look at the narrative and it must have been hard to keep everything working in this way... but it does work and the sense of things coming together one after the other is part of the charm of the film, it has to be said. This includes a massive perception switch near the end... a trick played on the audience which is heralded quite a few times as the structure of the writer’s account is discussed and, although I could kinda see it coming from a long way off as a result of that, it’s a nice moment because it helps the film find a resolution of sorts. It’s also, perhaps, saying that some narratives can retain an illusion of flexibility to head towards something which is not, entirely, unlike a Hollywood ending, it has to be said.

The film is beautifully shot and colour palettes sometimes offset each other (I suspect I’ll pick up an underlying design scheme matching the story structure on a second watch) with very early scenes, for example, favouring warm browns and reds which are immediately contrasted, when Lucia arrives at the island, with largely washed out blues and icy whites.

Another thing which makes this absolutely hypnotic is the amount of wonderful performances by all the key players. They all work together absolutely brilliantly and it all helps maintain the illusion of a story which feels like it could suddenly go in any direction with scenes of tragedy and devastating loss making strange but comfortable bed fellows with scenes of joy and laughter.

There’s also a fair amount of nudity and sex and I was kinda surprised that the DVD I bought is actually uncut, now I’ve seen it. It’s been given a standard 18 rating over here but some of the sexual content is usually only reserved for an R18 certificate (which means something is only allowed to be sold in a sex shop... unless that’s been changed recently but this is an old disc now). For example, the use of erect penises and things being done to them is rarely allowed in commercial cinema over here (I was originally going to call this review Writer’s Cock but then decided against it for... a couple of reasons). Apparently the original US release of this was censored by two minutes.

Perhaps my only real criticism of the film is the score by Alberto Iglesias. For some reason this just felt a little anemic next to events on screen and I felt the music distracted rather than served the drama in this case. It’s rare for me to say something that critical about a film score, to be honest, so... yeah, I must have really hated that aspect of the film, I guess.

All in all, though, I would certainly recommend Sex And Lucia to pretty much most ‘friends of film’, both to ardent cinephiles or semi-casual viewers like myself. There’s a lot to love about this movie and, honestly, Paz Vega is particularly cute as the character by whom we are introduced to the initial threads of the interwoven story components. Definitely check this one out if you get the opportunity.