Marta Barber
Miami Herald
Published: Friday, August 9, 2002
Julio Medem's Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucia) is a battle between the senses and the intellect, with the soul clearly the winner. The film involves a romantic set of encounters, sometimes tender, sometimes overtly raw, in which the only thing left to the imagination is what happens above the neck. The film is a love story that begins well, takes a tortuous detour and ends, as the king in The King and I would say, a puzzlement.
There are two stories: One is about Lucía, a thoroughly modern woman unafraid to go after what she wants. But when things go wrong, she feels the need to escape. The other is about sex: explicit, sometimes gratuitous, though nothing to alarm an adult audience. (Medem refused to tone down the sex scenes for distribution in the United States.)
Unlike Y Tu Mamá También and Intimacy , two recent films in which sex was an integral part, Sex and Lucía is not about unleashing repressed desires. Sexuality doesn't inhibit these characters. The sensual scenes may jolt your libido, but in the end it's the story that kindles reaction even as it defies easy explanation.
Lucía (Paz Vega) is a waitress who is having no success in lifting her live-in writer boyfriend, Lorenzo (Tristán Ulloa), from a deep depression. When she gets home one night after work and realizes that Lorenzo is not home, Lucía fears the worst. A telephone call from a policeman with ''bad news'' makes Lucía assume he is dead.
Flashback six years, when Lucía approaches Lorenzo at a bar and tells him she's secretly in love with him but not that she's been stalking him. They begin living together. She works at the restaurant and he struggles to finish a novel. Everything seems fine, until one day Lorenzo's friend Carlos tells him about a woman named Elena who has a child. The girl was conceived during a one-night fling Elena had with a stranger in a secluded beach in an unnamed Mediterranean island. The details match the seductive opening scenes of the film, and Lorenzo realizes he is the father.
It is here that the focus turns from Lucía to Lorenzo, who becomes so central to the plot that the film could easily have been titled Sex and Lorenzo . As he watches the girl play at her day-care center, Lorenzo is smitten by Belén, the baby sitter. They arrange for an encounter at Elena's home.
But something terrible happens that sends Lorenzo into an emotional hole. This ties in snugly with the beginning of the film, but by then the story has shifted and is ready to take on a new dimension with Medem shuffling between reality and fiction.
Are all the events really happening or are they part of Lorenzo's novel? Is the book a product of his imagination or is Lorenzo fictionalizing reality? Even when you think you're ahead of Medem's game, something throws you back.
As the film begins its final stretch, Lucía escapes to that Mediterranean island on which she hopes to uncover the mystery of what drove Lorenzo away. Unknown to her, Elena lives on the island.
Some of the island scenes are shot in overexposed, high-definition digital video, giving the beach shots a luminous and surreal background. The island is so important to this part of the story that the film could also have been called Sex and the Island. Sex and Lucía was well-received at the Toronto and Sundance film festivals and won two Goyas, Spain's equivalent of the Oscars, including the best actress award for Vega as Lucía.
As he did in his 1998 Lovers in the Arctic Circle , Medem plays with beginnings and ends, intending to play with the minds of the audience. Yet you cannot avoid being swept in his game. Medem may have disrobed most of the cast, leaving their bodies exposed, but the plot remains as guarded as a virgin with a chastity belt. That's why Sex and Lucía is so alluring.
Movie review, 'Sex and Lucia'
By Michael Wilmington
"Sex and Lucia" is one of the sexiest movies out this year to date. It's a hallucinatory tale about a seemingly tragic love affair that detours through the world of imagination and memory. The result: a blissful island idyll, seething with eroticism and gorgeous visions of sun and sea.
"Sex" is set in modern Madrid and on the Mediterranean isle of Formentera, but it also takes place in the present and the past, in real life and within the imaginary confines of a novel. And Spanish writer-director Julio Medem packs it with so much stunning, wildly colorful imagery -- and so much sex -- that it transfixes you even when you're not quite sure what's going on. (For some audiences, that may be often.)
Instead, Medem, the vibrant young director of "Terra" and "Cows," whirls you from one time and place to another with swiftness and ease while his uninhibited cast members (including star Paz Vega, whose performance here earned her the Goya -- the Spanish Oscar -- for Best Actress) keep stripping themselves bare, emotionally and sexually. Vega plays Lucia, first shown intertwined, underwater, with her lover, Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa), and then in the blackness of the Madrid night as she receives a last desperate phone call from Lorenzo. Later, she's informed by the police of his death by accident.
Distraught, she travels to Formentera and almost immediately tumbles down a huge hole that opens into another world. In this world of reverie, we see -- mixed together, with little regard for chronology or classical narration -- Lucia's meeting with Lorenzo, the raffishly appealing writer she's adored from afar; Lorenzo's liaison with another woman, Elena (Najwa Nimri of Medem's "Lovers of the Arctic Circle"); and the birth of Lorenzo's and Elena's daughter, Luna (Silvia Llanos). Then we plunge into a visualization of the novel Lorenzo is writing while he's with Lucia, a tale that may or may not be a true record of his high jinks with the adolescent Belen (Elena Anaya). Belen lives in a sexually complicated household, and she also baby-sits for Luna, Lorenzo's daughter.
A tragedy erupts in this story as well, a darkness that alternates with the blazing sunlight and sensuality of Formentera's beaches, where Lucia meets Elena, as well as a man, Carlos (Daniel Freire), who seems to be the double of the mother's lover in Lorenzo's novel.
Does it all sound confusing? It is. But what's important in "Sex" is less verisimilitude -- the story is full of outrageous coincidences -- than the scintillating visuals and conflicts and the sultry mood. Like "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and the recent flood of French eroticism ("The Piano Teacher," "Fat Girl," "Pola X"), "Sex and Lucia" uses the screen's current sexual openness with intimacy and abandon. The sex is frequent, but it's completely integrated into the story, which is, after all, about sexual obsession and betrayals.
Spanish cinema has often revealed a flair for bizarre melodrama; the country's greatest director (even though he was an exile who mostly worked in Mexico and France) was Luis Bunuel. Medem's film is in the Bunuel tradition; he's defiantly sexy and radical. But Medem also goes in for the flashy, ravishing visuals Bunuel usually eschewed. (Here, they're shot by the splendid cinematographer Kiko de la Rica.) The movie is a journey into a land of wonders beneath the surface of consciousness,-- but it's also a sexual ride of unabated heat. You may be confused by "Sex and Lucia," but you won't be unmoved.
3 stars (out of 4)
"Sex and Lucia"
Directed and written by Julio Medem; photographed by Kiko de la Rica; edited by Ivan Aledo; art direction by Montserrat Sanz; music by Alberto Iglesias; produced by Fernando Bovaira. A Palm Pictures release; opens Friday at the Century Center Cinema. In Spanish; English subtitled. Running time: 2:09. No MPAA rating (adult: sensuality, nudity, language, violence).
Lucia -- Paz Vega
Lorenzo -- Tristan Ulloa
Elena -- Najwa Nimri
Carlow/Antonio -- Daniel Friere
Belen -- Elena Anaya Luna -- Silvia Llanos
Michael Wilmington is the Chicago Tribune Movie Critic.
