IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
SEX AND LUCIA
Written and Directed by Julio Medem
Sexual fantasy is the warp and woof of "Sex and Lucia", the soapy but absorbing new movie from Spanish writer-director Julio Medem currently packing them in at The Screen at the College of Santa Fe. Medem, whose last picture was "Lovers of the Arctic Circle", favors the elliptical as a narrative style. Here, he tells a story about lovers - two, three, four, or more - that may be partly real and partly fantastical, or all fantasy, or fantasy wrapped up in fiction, or vice versa. Anyway, you get the idea. Very little is what it seems, but then of course that all depends on how it seems to you.
Medem's narrative jumps around in time, occasionally identifying the jump with a "Six Years Earlier" title, but usually not. It begins on an island, where a passionate watery moonlight coupling is underway. Neither of them turns out to be Lucia, although God knows there's plenty of sex. The guy, as we will soon discover, is Lorenzo, the girl is Elena, but neither of them know the other's name - it's one of those exquisitely thrilling encounters that seem to have materialized out of nowhere, with precious little information exchanged, beyond "That was the best sex I've had in my life!" In other words, it has all the earmarks of sexual fantasy.
Then we jump ahead six years, and meet Lucia, just around the time she gets some tragic news about Lorenzo, which sends her fleeing off to mend her broken heart on, and why not, the very island where sex and Elena took place. Then we jump back again in time to their meeting. He's a writer, with one published novel and a massive case of writer's block, which he is discussing with his agent in a café when he meets the beautiful Lucia. She accosts him at the cigarette machine and tells him she's crazy about his novel and is crazy about him and nothing will do but she must live with him and spend their days and nights making wild, passionate love. In other words, it has all the earmarks of sexual fantasy.
They proceed along those lines, and pretty soon he's writing again, and what he's writing about is her and the sex they're having and the sex he had with Elena back on the island, and then he finds out that Elena had his baby, and he surreptitiously meets his daughter where she goes to the park with her nanny, a lusty bombshell named Belen, and pretty soon he's getting it on with her in a manner that has all the earmarks of sexual fantasy, and all of this is going into his writing too, and pretty soon we begin to realize that looking for solid footing here is as treacherous as trying to cross the room at a wall-to-wall orgy. It's all about storytelling, and Lorenzo the writer is fond of repeating that there is a place at the end of a story where you can fall through a hole and come back again to the middle and make it turn out any way you want it to.
Tristan Ulloa, who plays Lorenzo, is a little passive and lacking in fire, but the women in the picture are beautiful and appealing. Paz Vega, a Spanish sitcom star who plays Lucia, is thin and shapely, and looks like a healthy Winona Ryder. She has a gleeful, innocent sparkle to her lust. She won one of the many Goyas (the Spanish Oscars) that were showered on this film.
The sex in "Sex and Lucia" is very hot, beautifully done, and even more graphic that the sex in "Sex in the City". Following the current European vogue for truth in copulation, it goes beyond the arch cutaways and coy angles employed in Hollywood to protect male genitalia from prurient Puritans, and vice versa. Be prepared to witness erections and the things that are done to and with them, as well as the more frequently exposed landscape of the female body, and to see it all in frank and clear-eyed close-up. Be prepared also to be amused, confused, titillated, absorbed, strung along, annoyed, intrigued, moved, exasperated, maybe even shocked. And be prepared to spend the rest of the evening sorting through what you've just seen, talking about it, and trying to make sense of it.
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