Lucia et le sexe

I found this film absolutely terrific. Ik know there's a lot of sex in it and yes, there are a lot of suspicious coincidences, but I looked past that.

For starters, I loved the story, it wasn't boring at all, despite what some may say. It was a sort of twisty fairytale to me, just like 'Los Amantes del Circulo Polàr' was. I love good fairy tales!

The acting was very good by most actors (I love you Najwa!), and good by the others. Even the girl that played Luna was convincing.

The film has a lot of explicit scenes (sexual and non-sexual) but besides from that Médem accomplishes to put a lot of suggestion in it (sexual and non-sexual). If you watch it attentively and past merely what you see, you will notice the subtlety of the characters and story.

Last of all i would like to say that the English title (Sex and Lucia) is an abomination to the original title (Lucia y el Sexo). The word are the same, but the word order has flipped, which gives the title a whole other meaning, to my opinion. The film is about Lucia and the meaning sex has in her life and the life of others. It is not about sex and the way Lucia handles with it. The meaning of film titles is often lost in translation (no pun intended). Why can't American (and other) people keep the original title? We can in Belgium.

A la proxima

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 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.

The earlier film by Julio Médem (Lovers of the Arctic Circle) is a prelude to the kind of cinematography that this Spanish film director/writer presents here. I have read most of the other comments, but they don't do justice to it, mainly because of the lack of understanding the original tongue of this film. The screenplay is excellent, full of metaphors and a rich use of very carefully chosen words. People who consider this film just an excuse for depicting sex scenes as the highlight of the movie are pretty much clueless. It is more than that, it is the complex storytelling that tangles the characters in this movie and the way that is told. Compelling and breath-taking. A must see.