Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.
After watching and reviewing three consecutive “heavy” films, I felt in the mood for something frivolous and gratifying and found it in the form of this erotic Spanish drama: Sex and Lucía. There’s plenty of sex, mostly featuring Lucía, but with an assortment of other attractive Spanish actors and actresses thrown in as well. The level of explicitness of the sex is roughly on a par with that seen in the popular Mexican film Y Tu Mamá También (2001). Although unrated, I imagine it falls somewhere in the zone between “R” and “X” (soft-core porn). Stylistically, it’s something of an art film, though somewhat less successful viewed on purely cinematic terms than as erotica.
Historical Background: Spanish director Julio Medem first came to my attention through his debut film Vacas (1991), which I praised highly in my review of it. Medem was just thirty-three when he made that film. He followed it with The Red Squirrel (1993), Tierra (1996), The Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998), Sex and Lucía (2001), and The Skin Against Stone (2003). I found Sex and Lucía a bit disappointing in relation to Vacas, which means “Cows”, though the teats were visibly improved. I imagine that Sex and Lucía must have been a good deal more successful than Vacas, given its erotic material. The ratings given it by critics are more highly mixed than I’ve seen for most any other film, ranging from 2/5 to 5/5. One critic had this to say, “Brilliant in every respect, Sex and Lucía is a rich, rewarding journey. The most wondrous love story in years, it is a great film.” Now contrast that with the conclusion of a less impressed reviewer: “Stripped of its portentous symbols, the poor thing looks downright scrawny in its nakedness – worth neither a backward glance nor a second thought.” You see the range of responses.
The Story: Medem is a director who loves to toy with enigmatic narrative design (and hence the minds of his audience). Rather than linear storytelling, Medem likes to twist the story's progression into a pretzel. In Lovers of the Arctic Circle, for example, Medem delivered a story that started at the two ends and worked its way toward the middle – like the building of the continental railway. Here, in Sex and Lucía, he starts fairly near the end of the story and bounces without obvious markers between the past and the present.
Furthermore, one of the principal characters in Sex and Lucía is a novelist who uses elements from his real life experiences in his novels, embellishing on reality to enhance artistic interest. It is not always clear, in this film, which narrative segments represent reality and which the embellished version of reality written into the developing novel. It’s not so much that the film is inadvertently confusing – it’s more likely that it is intentionally confusing. Confusion is part of the effect that viewers are meant to derive from the film. Therefore, what follows as a description of the plot should be understood as only an approximation. I’ve attempted to straighten the tale out linearly rather than presenting it in the sequence in which its occurs in the film. Medem would probably hate me for doing so!
Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa) is an aspiring and moderately successful author of romantic novels. Like many authors, he periodically suffers writer's block. His publishing agent and friend, Pepe (Javier Camara), helps Lorenzo out both with advances and by sometimes setting him up with some rather kinky situations that may provide creative inspiration. Some six or so years ago, Lorenzo visited a remote and beautiful island where he met a woman, Elena (Najwa Nimri). Though strangers, the two had shared a fantastic sexual tryst in a moonlit lagoon, which, each agreed, was the best sex they had ever experienced. Instead of exchanging names, the two had only exchanged “hints” about their respective identities (“it’s less complicated that way”). She was a gourmet cook from Catalina and he a birthday boy from Madrid. It happened to be his birthday – May 23rd. After their one night of pleasure, the two had gone their separate ways.
Back in Madrid, Lorenzo later meets the radiant Lucía (Paz Vega) – obviously the title character. Lucía is a waitress who has secretly fallen madly in love with Lorenzo, after reading his first novel and then stalking him a bit from a distance. She has a dilemma that only Lorenzo can solve. Her boss, who she likes, has asked her to move in with him but she’d really rather live with Lorenzo (who has never previously met her). He asks if there’s anything else she wants, to which she adds that if they live together, he’ll fall in love with her, of course. This being every man’s ultimate fantasy (ravishingly beautiful girl with perfect body begs you to let her live with you and devote her life to loving you), he replies, “I think I just did.”
Viewers are now treated to Lucía and Lorenzo getting to know one another: kissing, dancing, Lorenzo pulling Lucía’s clothes off for the first time, Lucía urging him to do whatever he wants to her (naturally), Polaroid nude photo sessions, and mutual strip teases (hers sensuous and his comical). Lucía struts about the apartment in the buff and, before viewers can so much as catch their breath, they’re at it again. It doesn’t hurt, in holding the interest of a substantial segment of the viewing audience through this portion of the film, that nature furnished Paz Vega with a lovely face, perfect rack, shapely derrière, and no shame.
Lorenzo is in such bliss that the draft version of his second novel turns out to be garbage, lacking the enriching tragic element that had made his first novel interesting. It’s up to Pepe to invent some impulse to Lorenzo’s creative juices. Pepe informs Lorenzo that his sister knows a nurse who helped deliver a baby for a woman who had come to Madrid in search of the baby’s father. The mother doesn’t know the name of the father, but the baby had been conceived on the father’s birthday on a moonlit evening on a remote island. The baby girl had been named “Luna.” Lorenzo realizes, of course, that this is his child. Pepe further informs him that the girl, now six, plays in a certain square in the city under the care of a nanny. Lorenzo can now surreptitiously meet his daughter and thereby gain some creative inspiration that can be applied to his writing.
Lorenzo stops by the city square and, soon, Luna (Silvia Llanos) has sat down beside him with her nanny, Belén (Elena Anaya). Lorenzo and Luna hit it off. He doesn’t tell her he’s her father, but takes on something of that role all the same. She’s receptive. He explains to her that his name is Lorenzo, which means “the sun”, while her name means “the moon.” At the same time, Lorenzo takes another kind of interest in Belén, another ravishingly beautiful young woman, probably in her late teens. Belén, it seems, lives with her mother, a former porn star, and her mother’s boyfriend, Carlos (Daniel Freire), a former client who enticed the mother into retirement. Belén (ah the life in Spain!) likes nothing more than to tell strangers the intimate details of her sexual fantasies. Lorenzo is, of course, delighted, since all of this is more fodder for his romantic novels. Belén enjoys nothing so much as watching one of her mother’s videos while masturbating. Lorenzo, intrigued, asks her if she has ever done it with Carlos. She hasn’t – out of loyalty to her mother. The next time they meet in the square, Belén reports that she had been practicing some of her mother’s positions while watching a tape and had fantasized that Carlos had come up behind her to watch. As Belén reports this experience to Lorenzo, it is duly portrayed for the audience, in a scene featuring hard-core porn on the television in the background and soft-core porn courtesy of Belén in the foreground. By now, both Lorenzo and we are pretty worked up. As coup de grace, Belén adds that she will be babysitting for Luna that night and would like Lorenzo to come over. She’ll ask the permission of Luna’s mother. Lorenzo agrees, provided that he won’t have to meet the mother.
Lorenzo shows up, after Elena has left for the evening, to play, first, the good daddy to Luna and, second, the stud-for-a-night to Belén. They have dinner together with Lorenzo dividing his time between father-figure interactions with Luna and flirtations with Belén. He tells Luna a bedtime story until she falls asleep. Now it’s time to get to fun and games with Belén. There’s a beastly Rottweiler that seems to respond to Belén’s pheremones that has to be shoved outside the bedroom door so that Lorenzo and Belén can have a go at it. This is where the story turns dark – very dark. Luna awakens and starts toward the site of the tryst and is mauled and killed by the damn Rottweiler. That’ll take the bite out of good sex right there!
Jump ahead several months. Elena is utterly devastated and has retreated to the tranquility of the island, where she suffers miserably while operating a bed-and-breakfast. Her only solace is her work as a writer of cookbooks and participation with an on-line chat site for writers, where a user with the moniker “Lighthouse” (Lorenzo) offers her a story that has “advantages.” There is a hole at the end of the story by which you can circle back to the middle and change it if you don’t like the ending (much like the film itself!). Belén, somewhere else in the world, continues to be distraught beyond words and beyond tears. For his part, Lorenzo has sunk into inconsolable depression, is lost to all work and play, and refuses to explain the cause to Lucía. [This is actually where the film begins] Lucía struggles to lift Lorenzo out of his doldrums, unsuccessfully. Coaxing, berating, threatening to split – all to no avail. At work at the restaurant, she receives a call from Lorenzo that seems to suggest he is close to suicide. She rushes home, but he is gone. A farewell note begs her for her forgiveness. Lucía receives a call from the police, informing her that there’s bad news, a vehicle . . . but she hangs up, unwilling to hear that Lorenzo has been killed. In profound distress, she gathers a few things, runs out, and determines to seek recovery on the island that meant so much to Lorenzo, but to which he would never take her.
On the island, Lucía encounters Carlos, who is there (coincidentally!) for scuba diving. Carlos directs Lucía to a bed-and-breakfast where she can get a room – Elena’s bed-and-breakfast (coincidentally!). Lucía, having read Lorenzo’s novel in progress and deriving bits and pieces of information in conversation with Elena, begins to realize that Lorenzo was her deceased daughter’s father as well as “Lighthouse.” There are also more nude scenes involving Lucía and the exceptionally well-hung Carlos.
Meanwhile, back in Madrid, it turns out that Lorenzo is alive after all. He is just now recovering from a severe hematoma that had rendered him unconscious for about four weeks. Good old Pepe had remained steadfastly at his side. [There’s a bit of irony here, because the actor who plays Pepe, Javier Camara, a year later played the role of a male nurse caring for a comatose patient in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her.] As Lorenzo regains his senses, Pepe has to give him the bad news that Lucía has disappeared. Lorenzo reasons that she probably went to the island and he and Pepe are soon on their way. It’s a double home-coming for Lorenzo. First he encounters Elena with big hugs all around. Then Elena tracks down Lucía so that she can receive the good news as well. More big hugs all around. I’m just left wondering what he’s going to do with two gorgeous lovers! Anything for good ol’ Pepe?
Themes: The obvious theme is that sex is fun, great sex is great fun, and great sex with gorgeous beauties like Paz Vega, Najwa Nimri, and Elena Anaya is more great fun than most men will ever have. The subsidiary message is don’t leave the Rottweiler loose while you’re having all that great fun.
Production Values: At times, the cinematography is lush and gorgeous. The production team did, after all, have a remote paradise island with which to work. There are lovely shots of the moon, moonlit water, lighthouses, and rocky caves and cliffs. The sexual imagery is potent and charged. There are times when the images seems unnecessarily dark. There is also way too much banal and obvious symbolism. The soundtrack is rather nice, featuring baroque-like music composed by Alberto Iglesias, who had worked on previous Medem films as well as All About My Mother (1999).
I don’t think you could ask for a better cast for a film of this nature. All of them are gorgeous, vivacious, and excellent performers. For me, the three lead women, Paz Vega, Najwa Nimri, and Elena Anaya, carried the film – Vega most of all. In fact, Vega won the Goya (Spanish Oscar) for best actress for her performance here. Tristan Ulloa, however, kept up his end – in more ways than one. I suppose that kind of acting comes naturally (or comes, naturally). Najwa Nimri previously appeared in Before Night Falls (2000).
Bottom-Line: The sex part of Sex and Lucía includes male and female full nudity, climaxes galore (singly and in pairs), boobs, butts, and erect penises. All repeatedly. This is erotica approximately on the single-X soft-porn level. The narrative is fairly pedestrian and jam-packed with less than credible coincidences, but its all presented in a kind of artsy, fanciful, intriguing manner that gives the film an art-house luster. As pure cinema, I’d give the film three-stars. As erotica, I think its five-stars, though obviously tastes in erotica vary tremendously from one viewer to another. The majority of viewers will probably find their way to this film for its erotica potential and will be satisfied that the story elements have been sufficient to sustain interest between the titillating scenes of sex and nudity. Sex and Lucía is in Spanish with English subtitles and has a running time of 128 minutes.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Spain:
A Madrid waitress, Lucia (Paz Vega), is mourning the loss of her boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa), a young novelist who died suddenly under mysteriou...More at HotMovieSale.com
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