Sex and Lucía (2001) User Reviews

Meta-story and story

[diand_ · 7/10 · 24 July 2005]

This is one of the better structured movies ever put to screen. It's as complex as Lynch's Lost Highway, but that only adds to the experience. A non-linear structure (in time and space) is applied and Lucia y el Sexo blurs the line between reality and imagination.

Basically, it's like Mulholland Drive: Most of what we see is a dream, imagination. Only a relatively small part did really happen. But this goes one step further: What part is in the eye of the beholder here, because little clues are given so the mystery format is only used to keep us entertained at a basic level.

A writer is the center here. Some parts of his life are probably true (trouble at home, sickness), others are ambiguous, others are certainly imagined. He is in the meta-story, but also places himself in threads in the other stories that come from his imagination. His imagination is formed by applying smaller and larger events (meeting a person at a party, seeing someone in front of the house) in his personal life to his fantasies. His erotic fantasies explain the title, as sex is one of the characters of the story. One of the story lines is again about his script read on the island by one of his imagined characters. Writing the story and telling the story is done simultaneously. As he becomes sick, the characters become helpless in the story. Overall it helps a lot if you keep imagining that you're watching imagined characters being manipulated by the writer. This combines meta-story and story, real with imagination, weaving several threads in a complicated web of story lines. In the end, it is made clear that the story doesn't end but starts again halfway, giving further evidence that viewers can use their imagination at random on this and create their own story out of it.

The meta-story is interesting, but by mixing it with the story itself we see the real story as what it is, a writing trick with imagined characters. That unfortunately diminishes the emotions a movie tries to convey. We're merely watching how a movie is structured, with the imagined story not having the usual dramatic impact.

It's remarkable that so many people are offended by the sex scenes, as it's already in the title. Do they also complain about the presence of aliens in Alien? I found the sex scenes to be made with some honesty; and at least they didn't even shy away of male nudity.

Outstanding European cinema

[Chris_Docker · 8/10 · 13 May 2002]

(8/10) Refreshing, delightful, sexy. moving and thought-provoking movie from Spain. Not really porn (as the title might suggest) although there is some very artistic explicitness. It is movies like this one that remind us that European cinema can scale the emotional dilemmas and mountains of a story where other films look at a storyline in terms of physical developments. Lucia, a young waitress in Madrid, falls completely in love with a writer. After a period of blissful togetherness, something from his past pulls him in two directions. We are caught up in his moral dilemma, of not wanting to lose the wonderful gift he has found and yet not wanting to be untrue to himself. The semi-autobiographical novel he is writing pulls together the story and the emotions and hopes of the characters and introduces ideas that enable them to heal some of their hurt. A central idea is that of finding a hole (symbolically on the sandy beach) where, after reaching the end of the story, you can jump back into the middle. That way you can try an make things turn out better ("If you give me time", says Lorenzo, Lucia's boyfriend.) A more mature and rounded work than the Director's earlier "Lovers of the Arctic Circle", Sex and Lucia combines wonderful acting, a great story, innovative cinema and spine-tingly beautiful photography. One of my favourite films of the year.

Simply Lovely

[elmarbel · 8/10 · 27 December 2004]

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

It's not about sex. . .

[Rogue-32 · 9/10 · 15 July 2002]

. . .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.

"Suddenly, you fall in a hole and it goes right back to the middle."

[fdpedro · 4 July 2004]

Films like SEX AND LUCIA are the ones that when somebody asks you to describe, you have a hard time trying not to mislead them. Imagine David Lynch telling a story of love, lust, deception, and betrayal in a sun-bathed slow atmosphere and not one dwarf in sight. It might fool you at first into thinking it's just another erotic romance where characters have sex and share their feelings for two hours, but as soon as the first plot turn grabs you, you never let go.

Let's try to describe the plot in a somehow linear structure: We meet a restaurant waitress named Lucia (Paz Vega) who appears to have emotional problems with her depressed boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristian Ulloa). One night she leaves work to find their apartment empty and receives tragic news: He apparently committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a car. Immediately after hearing it, Lucia packs her bags and leaves to a Mediterranean isolated island where Lorenzo apparently had an early sexual experience with a nameless cook. Then we track back in time six years earlier when Lucia and Lorenzo first met. He was a famous writer whom she fell in love when reading his book and stalked him for days until finally confessing her obsession in a restaurant table. What follows are countless scenes where Lorenzo and Lucia interact through sex. We get cheap, gratuitous intercourse like never before in a major motion picture and it is treated quite normally with honest sensual bravery. Of course, you would only understand that from watching the uncut version. Lorenzo is currently writing a second follow-up novel and as his best friend Pepe (Javier Camara) advises: "Put lots of sex in it, people like that!" Now this is where I am completely lost as to how to continue to describe this plot in a linear structure. Well, Lorenzo learns he had a daughter with that cook he met in the island and she is now six years of age and named Luna. While trying to get near her, he starts having an affair with her babysitter (?) Belem (Elena Ayana). This particular sibling has an unhealthy affair with her stepfather who met her mother while working in the porn industry. Lorenzo eventually includes these characters in his novel which keeps being read aloud by Lucia.

Meanwhile back at the island in what appears to be present day (?) Lucia meets a scuba diver named Carlos (Daniel Freire, who also plays Belem's stepfather) and follows him to a nice cozy guest house owned by an excellent cook named Elena (Najwa Nimri). Want a big twist now? It turns out Elena is the lady who Lorenzo had an affair with six years ago and the mother of Luna. It appears that Elena is one highly active internet girl who comforts her loneliness by surfing in the world-wide web. In there she meets an anonymous writer who keeps writing her a story with no narrative rules (sounds familiar, doesn't it?) and that person is actually Lorenzo. Did he survive the suicide attempt? It just keeps getting weirder and more confusing to the point where you can no longer tell if what is being played on screen is reality or the work of Lorenzo's novel.

Director Jaime Medem was also the man behind LOVERS OF THE ARTIC CIRCLE, a 1998 film about an unusual couple composed of complete opposites (named Otto and Ana) so it makes partial sense that he was also behind SEX AND LUCIA. This is a film also about the faith of particular characters and how they all interact to each other by one key point: Lorenzo's writing. When walking out of the film, one is unable to tell weather or not the sun-drenched, paradisiacal island is real or some imaginary plot device where characters go to relax and wash away their sorrows and worries. Is it supposed to make sense? Is there a key as to how to unlock the film's nonsensical linear structure? Unfortunately, this film was not as analyzed and dissected as MULHOLLAND DRIVE, so we might never learn. What is left is not an erotic film., but a beautiful, warm, romantic tale set to Alberto Igleasias' remarkable music score and seen through the cinematography by Kiko de la Rica whose work with digital is truly remarkable where the sunlight-bathed island is so bright to a point where the image looks anemic. I think the regular audience might finish watching a movie like this and at least have an idea about what happened, and I guess that is already worth any explanation.

(5/5)

A Keeper Without a Lighthouse

[rmax304823 · 6/10 · 17 February 2006]

I can't remember seeing many movies that were more beautifully shot than this one. It doesn't hit you over the head like one of David Lean's colossal spectacular stupendous architectiptoptoloftical magnificences but it is quietly effective. Faded when it needs to be, dark and moody when required. It's not just the pretty setting. The interiors are as well done as the undulating sea grass. And the performances are equally accomplished.

The plot, though. Well -- the plot. It's as if the people behind the movie had gorged themselves on Finnegans Wake and Borges to the point of bursting and then had sat down and storyboarded the whole movie on a major binge. (And I thought only the French could outfox me.)

There are some notions -- I hesitate to call them "themes" -- that run through the movie. There is the sea, of course, and the island, and the moon ("Luna"), and sex, telling stories, and conception and birth, and reproduction. I'm being kind of loose with some of those definitions so that "reproduction", for instance, includes writing novels, as does "telling stories" to children.

I'm on kind of shaky ground with most of those ideas so let's stick to sex, which I more or less understand. There's all sorts of hetero- and autosexual stuff in it, maybe even a hint of bestiality, but you get used to it. I went through the Human Sexuality Training Program at Berkeley along with a couple of hundred other professional types, many of them elderly ladies. The first thing the organizers did was have everyone sit down in an amphitheater and watch one full hour of pornographic movies, homosexuals at work, old folks, elephants. Satiated, the participants were no longer shockable and were ready to deal frankly with sex. This movie has a similar effect. One erect penis may be worth a gasp but by the time the second rolls around you're wondering what it has to do with the plot.

And, I'm sorry but I still can't get over the plot. This guy Lorenzo is evidently trying to write a novel, see, and this girl, Paz Vega, a total stranger, approaches him in a bar and suggests they live together. And at the end they ARE living happily together. It's everything in between that stumps me.

I could ask a dozen questions about the plot but will just give one example. What happened to the little girl, Luna? I could make as good a guess as anyone else but it would still be just that, a guess. Anyway, I won't list them all because you'll be asking yourselves the same questions after you see this film.

Not that I want to bash it. As I said, the actors are uniformly good. I especially liked the novelist, Lorenzo, who has a face that is sympatico without being the least bit handsome. And it's a movie for grownups, which nowadays is a novelty. There isn't the slightest nod to raw adolescent sensibilities. Phrases pop up from time to time that raise those little flags you see when you've marked an email message in your inbox as worthy of more attention. "A lighthouse without a keeper."

The plot may be a lot more murky than the Mediterranean Sea in this film but I sat through it all with interest, waiting to see how or if they could pull it all together.

This is a beautiful poetic film about love, sex and forgiveness

[Core242 · 10/10 · 7 January 2003]

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.

Director sacrifices character development for gratuitous sex (minor spoilers)

[mycranium · 6/10 · 6 June 2003]

There are two major problems with this movie. One is that a large amount of time is devoted to gratuitous sex scenes between Lucia and Lorenzo. Delightful as they may be, by the time Lucia is walking out on Lorenzo, there has been very little in the film to demonstrate that the bond between them is based on anything besides Lorenzo's acquiescence to Lucia's sexual aggressiveness. Lucia's initial contact with Lorenzo is the result of the fantasies she has about him based on his novel, which implies a delusional state of mind (not to mention her stalker behavior). I have nothing against on-screen sex nor against sexually aggressive women, but there was so little emotional connection between them established in the film that I had trouble buying that they had been together for six months, let alone several years. Besides, who keeps the same bad haircut for six years? Lorenzo, that's who.

The other problem is the swarming mass of coincidence that brings all the players together on the island. The coincidences start early (Pepe's sister somehow knows the mother of Lorenzo's daughter) and Medem keeps piling them on until they're so thick it's ridiculous. It may be argued that this phenomenon is a result of the vague notion that the movie is about the intersection of reality and fiction, but that sounds to me more like a lame rationalization after the fact than a deliberately employed storytelling device. It feels self indulgent, even lazy from a writing standpoint.

Okay, make that three major problems: the assertion that the story has a hole where one can enter at the end and re-emerge in the middle and possibly change the outcome is bogus. If it is to be believed then most of the movie must be regarded as nothing more than a pessimistic fantasy played out in the head of a writer. Remember the infamous season of "Dallas?" Medem declared that he wanted to make this film more uplifting and optimistic than "Lovers of the Arctic Circle." Could he only achieve this through the use of such an artificial deus ex machina? Medem seems to be going for magical realism, but he merely emulates its superficial qualities. A lot of sex, some washed-out photography, quirky characters and a bunch of unbelievable coincidences may add up to a hypnotic fable for some. For me it's all condiment and no entree.

Medem is reputed to have rehearsed this thing for 5 months. In my opinion he should have either spent longer and come up with a more credible script, or he should have made the movie much more quickly. Some sense of spontaneity would have been welcome in this ponderous lack-of-character drama.

Brilliantly made and constructed movie.

[Boba_Fett1138 · 9/10 · 22 January 2007]

This is really one of the better constructed movies I've seen in a while.

Both the storytelling and style of the movie can be called unique.

It starts mixing reality with fiction and its hard to tell what really happened and what didn't. It features lots of 'what-if' themes and the story is being rewritten in the characters mind, also with lots of symbolism, mainly with the moon and the water. It doesn't make this the most accessible movie but then again, you don't ever have to watch an European movie for its accessibility.

Things start off quite slow but as the story develops the story gets more and more complicated and non-linear, when the line between fiction and reality gets blurred more and more. It does make the movie hard to follow at times but it at the same time makes the movie more interesting to watch and enables everybody start to define things on their own. You of course have to be open to these sort of movies though. Also the very explicit nudity isn't just for everybody.

Sex plays a key part in the movie. It helps to tell the story and plays a significant role in the story lines and help to indicate when things are truth or fiction. Never before has sex played such a key part in the storytelling of a movie.

This movie is always presented as a Paz Vega but this movie it's main character is in my opinion played by Tristán Ulloa. He's the writer, were the entire movie involves around. The story is mostly set inside his head. The three main actors (Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa, Najwa Nimri) of the movie are really good and carry the entire movie.

Visually the movie is really great and impresses just as much as the storytelling of the movie. The camera-work and colors are really great and create a very unique atmosphere for the movie. It helps to make "Lucía y el sexo" an even bigger and more enjoyable movie to watch, visually.

Those who are open for an unique, one of a kind, unusual movie experience, will surely be delighted with this magnificent beautiful looking and constructed movie.

9/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Give it a chance -- or two

[Euphorbia · 7/10 · 2 October 2004]

I watched this movie on DVD the first time, kept wanting to like it, but couldn't. It seemed disjointed and wantonly shuffled, like a dismantled jigsaw puzzle. Elena's pointed gesture at the story printout near the end finally made clear to me that the movie's resemblance to a Klein bottle (a 4-dimensional moebius strip whose neck opens back into its center) was intended, not accidental. In other words, it was not my fault that I could not follow the story, but rather the director's purpose that I should not. Why he chose this structure still eludes me, but there it is.

I thought about this afterwards, baffled because the performances were excellent, yet the overall effect was both annoying and disappointing. My gut reaction was to rate it low (5/10) because the chopped up structure was so distracting, yet this seemed unfair because many of the elements were really good.

I watched the DVD again the next night. Already knowing the story made a tremendous difference -- along with realizing from the beginning that the "mermaid" is not Lucia, which on a cinema-size screen would possibly have been obvious, but was not obvious on my monitor. I found the structure a lot clearer, and could really savor the terrific performances, particularly by the three women.

Most remarkable of this first-rate ensemble is Elena Anaya (Belen) who is in the same class as Audrey Hepburn. She doesn't get much dialog, and doesn't need it. She conveys every nuance of her beguiling but sinister character by glance, expression, and gesture, that all come across perfectly with or without subtitles. Ethereally beautiful, forthrightly erotic, sweetly innocent, dangerously demented -- that's Belen. Her wordless reaction to "first and last" is one of the most memorable such scenes in cinema, and most actors will never come close to equaling it.

** POSSIBLE SPOILER FOLLOWS **

There is one thing about this movie that I disliked the first time, and that I positively came to hate the second time. This was the color design. It was dreadful. Its rationale was "explained" in one of the DVD interviews, but its being intentional made it even worse than if it had merely been a technical glitch.

Sex and Lucia was shot on 24P HD video, which allowed free manipulation of the color palette anywhere in the movie. The problem was that Medem and his team used this new power recklessly -- and did so in every single scene. The net result was that most of the movie looks as if it had been shot on outdated Ektachrome, developed at Photomat, and then left out in the sun for a few months.

Hint to budding directors: For emotive color manipulation to work, there must be a baseline of realistic color that one moves away from -- or it will come across as a mistake. Moreover the shift into abstract or emotion-based color must happen organically, without calling attention to itself.

Peter Jackson did this masterfully in Lord of the Rings (explained in the DVD appendix to the Fellowship of the Ring). Jean-Pierre Jeunet did it even better in Amelie. Wayne Wang did it reasonably well in Center of the World (also shot on video, like Sex and Lucia). But Medem, alas, got swept up in the novelty of this technology, so that it is constantly obtrusive and distracts from his story.

Medem set up two artificial color schemes for this film, one for Madrid, the other for the island. These were further varied by whether a particular scene was past or present. But the schemes did not differ sufficiently from each other to make it clear where or when a scene was unfolding, while they all differed so much from real color and light that the color grading became a barrier between the story and the audience.

Overall rating 7/10 -- with possible further revision upward.

*

If you like Sex & Lucia, you might also like:

Romance, by Catherine Breillat

Center of the World, by Wayne Wang

Summer Lovers, by Randall Kleiser

A Girl in a Swing, book by Richard Adams

Slick and clever, but a bit too contrived to be genuinely engaging

[bitterstranger · 5/10 · 19 November 2004]

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.

profound, beautiful, visceral

[swarat · 10/10 · 26 May 2003]

SPOILER ALERT Sex and Lucia is one of those movies that will grab me and won't let go. I saw it with the fascination a child has for her bedtime tale, I connect to it with my soul and viscera. The movie speaks of an island where one can change the course of one's life, an island that floats like a raft atop the sea, that is so full of caves as to be nearly hollow, so that each of the many holes you may fall into is really a tunnel that will take you somewhere else. This is the island of Lorenzo the writer, Lucia's boyfriend.

But to start at the start. Lorenzo's first book told the story of a birthday boy who had made love to a stranger on a full moon night in the ocean. He is having a writer's block while writing his second. Lucia and he become lovers after Lucia meets him at a coffeeshop and tells him she is in love with him and wants to live with him. In parallel, we see a daughter being born from Lorenzo's nameless union. In time, in his second novel, Lorenzo will have to face his child, named Luna after the full moon. His agent gives him the plot of this story, where Luna is born and he finds her in a park, and this leads to a house where a man lives with two women, and there is torment, passion, suffocation, lust. Lorenzo gets to spend a night with his child only if he succumbs to the lust of sexy au pair Belen; in an unforgettable scene he tells a bedtime story to his daughter in a bedroom furnished as if it's underwater, just as Belen dresses herself up for seduction. Luna dies before Lorenzo can tell her that he is her father, but this death has to be a secret too. Lorenzo is dragged into a relentless trajectory of secrets, depression, sleeping pills, and knows that he has to either kill Belen and her mother, and set himself free, or kill himself.

At all points of the movie, the characters of Lorenzo's fiction interact with and exist as real human beings; we see their lives change as Lorenzo types away at his computer, but they are also free agents. This means the film works at two layers. One can treat Lorenzo's passions, his infidelities, his child, the deaths, the sex, as real, and have a consistent interpretation. But true meaning comes from the layer above, where we actually live within a writer's mind, and see how events here coexist with, and are influenced by, thinks that "really" happen to the writer. Metaphor merges with reality, fiction becomes life, life finds meaning and resolves itself in fiction.

The storms and dark secrets in Lorenzo's fictional world are metaphors for his obsession, passion and conflict, the abyss that drags him deeper and deeper. He cannot share these tensions with Lucia because he thinks he is too poisoned within. He has fallen into a hole, he says, from where there is no escaping. Or not really, because he is still in touch with Luna's mother Elena through anonymous internet chat. He has been telling her a story that gives her two "advantages": one, that at the end of the story there's a hole that leads one back to the middle of the story, and two, one can change one's course any time. And we see Luna has partly changed her course, she is back on Lorenzo's island. But Lorenzo is still far away from her, and, in a way, far away from Lucia. Will he be able to change the course of his life, will the hole he has fallen into lead him back to the middle of the story? Such a story has to involve Lucia-- will Lucia get back Lorenzo? Will there be a resolution?

Yes, there will, but Lucia is, so far, only a reader, an admirer. She is perplexed by Lorenzo's self-absorbedness, this darkness, this hole, that she doesn't understand. So she leaves him though she knows she is still in love with him, and then her world shatters when she hears he is dead. In reality, Lorenzo is in a coma, and will come back to life later, as her "advantage" plays out. For the moment, however, Lucia's "loss" will make her cycle in Lorenzo's world, and when she moves to Lorenzo's island, the island Lorenzo would never take her to, she is really inside the hole he was in (she falls into a real cave in the island, as well). She has to travel this world and meet the characters of his fiction in "real life", before she will see him again. But by then the fictional and real worlds will get united, by the time Lucia and Lorenzo come together at the end, the two parallel lives of Lorenzo have become one. United and resolved, like in sex. It is this journey of Lucia to union, this tale of sex and Lucia, that the film chronicles.

There is another angle to the name, as well: sex and writing are both about creation. The world Lorenzo creates pulls him in like sex does (into a hole, in both cases?). Like sex, there is the potential for obsession, and like the man he writes about, he is tormented by the tensions between the two women, two world that he has created. Upto this this is all Lorenzo's. But as the movie progresses, Lucia finds herself in a house with a man and another women, sexual tensions building up between them. Her course changes. It's because she is on that island that Elena gets to meet Lorenzo, and she really reunites Lorenzo and the mother of his child, resolves their story. And isn't that child really Lucia's love, in a way? The book that conceived Luna also made Lucia fall in love with Lorenzo, the shot of their first union cuts into Luna's birth, they both dropped into a hole together, and at the end, when Elena tells Lucia that she is a gift to the earth, she looks as happy as she would if she got back her lost child. The child who Lorenzo didn't trust with the secret, but who would have kept it if he told her. Finally she reaches the heart of that secret, the secret of her birth and her lover, through a journey of her own, hence Sex and Lucia.

The little details matter. The dog that killed Luna also features in a shot on a television screen at the coffeeshop where Lucia picks Lorenzo up. Elena's anonymous friend uses a lighthouse as his icon; like a lighthouse, he shows her how to change her course, they meet for the second time in front of the island's lighthouse. The music, the visuals of the island and the underwater shots are magnificent. The metaphor of the caves in the island works very well. Each death punctuates the end of one phase and the beginning of another, almost like a chapter ending. And the end isn't just an end, it's a second chance, a resurrection, an "advantage". We see Carlos, Belen's mom's lover and, subsequently, Elena's guest, disappearing into a hole, we find that Belen and his mom have been declared missing. Maybe they have dropped into a hole as well, waiting to pop up somewhere else, waiting to change the courses of their lives. Those are different stories, different journeys.

The acting is very good. Paz Vega, in particular, is brilliant as Lucia. All through the movie, sex is portrayed without guilt and prissiness, but it is never affected or gratuitous. I feel extremely upset the way so many American reviewers seem to be more preoccupied with the sex depicted in the movie than the movie itself.

Oh, I adore this film.

The story that never ends

[LeRoyMarko · 7/10 · 14 November 2004]

At time beautiful, at time confusing like hell, this movie is worth watching. I must admit it caught me off-guard. I guess I was expecting another "Y tu mama tambien", for some reason. But this one is closer to "Adaptation." Lorenzo is consumed with his novel. Reality and fiction become all tangled. Confused, I identify with a previous user that said that he wanted to like the movie, but found it difficult. As for the sex scenes, they're passionate, pure, some could even say beautiful. There's nothing wrong with that. I enjoyed both performances by Paz Vega (Lucía) and Tristán Ullea (Lorenzo), but it's Elena Anaya (Belen) who steals the show. She's sublime in her role. As for the "the never ending" theme, I suspect the director used it to clear away a lot of guessing that people might have watching his film.

Out of 100, I gave it 75. That's good for **½ out of ****.

Seen at home, in Toronto, on November 13th, 2004.

Julio Medem's sensitive and emotive film that launched Paz Vega to stardom

[ma-cortes · 5/10 · 5 February 2020]

Lucía (Paz Vega) is a young waitress in a restaurant in the centre of Madrid. Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa) is a a writer who is blocked , while his editor (Javier Camara) suggests him he write about a sexual tryst and to put a lot of sex in it . This meeting is interrupted by the beautiful young woman Lucia who confesses she has been watching him for some time , since she fell in love with his first novel . Then, there takes place an enjoyable romance between them . Later on , it happens a distress and Lucia seeks refuge on a quiet , secluded Mediterranean island Formentera -in Majorca Islands- ; there Lucia starts discovering the dark corners of her past . Various lives (Najwa Nimri , Daniel Freire, Paz Vega) converge on an isolated island , all connected by an author whose novel has become inextricably entwined with his own life.

A poetic and complex film , resulting in a little boring and dull story .This is a surprising , mysterious , ravishing and gorgeous picture ; however , it turns out to be tiring . Strange story about peculiar love stories among unsettling and grieving youngsters who suffer distresses and unfortunes . Spanish production with fine acting , colorful cinematography , excellent settings and rousing musical score by Alberto Iglesias . Julio Medem directed the film for Sogetel and producers Enrique López Lavigne , Fernando Bovaira , and it was released in 2001 . Julio Medem likes to disorient , his characters like to challenge each other too . Love and sex are the dual starting points for the entwined script strands of another Julio Medem walk in a world full of sensitivity and pain . There's lots of sex here , exhibicionist , ecstatic , and exuberant giving way to a more damaging hedonism . Although the film itself starts slow and running outwards and backwards , teasing with its secrets .

Exceptional cinematography showing Formentera island , bathed in an atmosphere of fresh air and dazzling sun by Kiko De La Rica . It displays a sensitive and emotive musical score by Alberto Iglesias . The motion picture was originally directed by Julio Medem . This is his most successful film , his first movie was ¨Vacas¨, his second one , "Ardilla Roja" or ¨The red squirrel¨ released in 1993, was selected for the Cannes Film Festival and it confirmed Medem's talents and won prizes in Fort Lauderdale, Bogota and Bucarest . Medem had been making short movies with a super-8 camera owned by his father until he received a call from a new production company called Sogetel and executive producers Fernando de Garcillán , José Luis Olaizola , Enrique López Lavigne . They were interested in his script titled "Vacas" . It won the Goya Award from the Spanish academy for best new director, and won prizes in the festivals of Tokyo, Torino and Alexandria. In 1998 Medem released " The lovers of the Polar Circle ," considered his best movie by most of his fans . It also became a box-office hit with more than one million spectators in Spain and was also released worldwide. In 2001 his fourth movie, "Lucia and sex ," became a huge hit and began the career of actress Paz Vega who won the Goya for best new actress . Although in 2003 failed with the release , "The Basque ball" , a documentary that portrays the phenomenon of nationalism and terrorism in the Basque Country of northern Spain , it was very polemical and partial . In 2007 directed the flop ¨Caotica Ana¨ and in 2010 , ¨Room in Rome¨, a successful though with not sense film , plenty of nudism and only starred by two gorgeous naked girls . Julio Medem is for sure one of the the most important and original Spanish filmmaker. Rating : 5.5/10 . Well worth watching if you get the chance , thanks to photography and soundtrack , though a little bit boring and slow-paced .

Sex as motion engine of the soul

[berglicht · 21 October 2005]

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.

beautifully, wildly, mysteriously explicit and implicit

[tezzzaaa · 9/10 · 14 November 2002]

With Lucia y el sexo Julio Medem draws on a lot of his familiar themes. Destiny,coincidence and fate alternating courses during people's lives. He also handled love and memories as important drives of people. Children tend to portray people's consciousness, with their fresh and honest innocence. As Luna's fate in this movie both infects and cleanses Salvador, taking him through his past and present.

Medem also likes to use nature to symbolize stages and feelings in his character's lives. The moon, soil, water and fish all come back repeatedly, each with a different meaning. This gives the movie a beautiful dreamy atmosphere, strongly backed up by the camera work.

Now to the sex in the movie. It's very strong from the beginning, but besides it's explicitness Medem also deals with it very sensitively. The sex is arousing but meaningful too. Anyone who's been in a passionate relationship must be touched by Salvador and Lucia's sex life, leading toward an almost dangerous addiction. I wondered if the rest of their relationship was strong enough to pass the test of time though, sex seemed to be at the core of their love. Some of the sex scenes were very aesthetically directed and filmed. The cunnilingus scene on this symphony-like music was classic! It's definitely the best oral sex scene I've ever seen on film. Arousing with a smile. I was also happy to see that the UK-version of the video was uncut, showing the male organs. Very refreshing that men are also portrayed vulnerably in a movie. The sex is much stronger and important in the first part of the film. That was functionable in the story as the characters saturate themselves in it, leading to problems, but somehow to me it also felt unbalanced.

Julio Medem has really made a beautiful film with Lucia y el sexo. I found it profoundly moving and captivating. You have to let yourself be carried away though or you might become saturated yourself, with the abundance of symbolism and sex.

Excessively Erotic, Confused Screenplay, But Also Very Intriguing

[claudio_carvalho · 7/10 · 10 June 2005]

In Madrid of the present days, the waitress Lucia (Paz Vega) leaves her job and goes to her apartment to meet her mate Lorenzo (Tristian Ulloa), who seems to be very depressed. When she arrives, she receives bad news about Lorenzo from the police. She moves alone to an isolated island, where she meets a stranger and lodges in a pension where he is living for the last months. The story shifts to six years ago, when Lorenzo and a woman, without knowing even the name of each other, have a magnificent sexual intercourse. The woman gets pregnant, and her daughter is raised with out a father. Meanwhile, Lorenzo is a writer that lost his creation skills and one night meets Lucia in a restaurant. She confesses to him that she is in love with him and has been stalking him for a long time. They fall in love for each other and Lucia moves to his apartment. Later, Lorenzo is informed by his friend Pepe (Javier Cámara) that he has a daughter, and he meets her in a square, with her baby sitter. From this point on, Lorenzo mixes his reveries with reality.

"Lucia y el Sexo" is a weird movie, with a style that resembles David Lynch. I am not sure whether this was the intention of the director Julio Medem, or whether his screenplay is indeed only confused. There are too much gratuitous sex scenes and exposure of genitals, inclusive of penises, and although Paz Vega is a delicious woman, I do not like this type of appellative exaggeration in a film. The story has good points, does not have clichés, and has many metaphoric scenes. I understand that the title of this movie mainly refer to periods of time, "Lucia" in the present days, sharing her life with Lorenzo, and "Sex" the consequences of his intercourse with an unknown woman six years ago. In the end, I found "Lucia y el Sexo" an excessively erotic film, with a confused screenplay, but also very intriguing. I intend to see this movie again in a near future and reevaluate it, trying to see if it becomes clearer after a second time. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Lucia e o Sexo" ("Lucia and the Sex")

Another masterpiece by Julio Meden

[lonx · 10/10 · 9 December 2002]

Once again Julio Meden reminds us that doing movies is an art. Not just story telling, but Art. The very way of telling the story can be artful, and this flick is a nice example. Newspaper reviews in my city gave it two stars out of four, but this guys would never give good ranking to a movie without gay action or dark, 10-ton-of-sadness endings. Great movies, artistically speaking, can be done without leaving the feel-good mood, like this one. Good acting, superb job of photography, optimistic way of portraying the human being, an excellent movie!

Don´t be shocked with the sex scenes, there´s much more story around. The director was very courageous to jeopardize the movie reputation among puritan, hypocritical viewers. 10 out of 10.

Heavy handed symbolism and contortionist plot

[georgiain · 6/10 · 23 July 2004]

What is sex and Lucia all about? This isn't as clear from the title as it would seem and after churning it over nothing gets any clearer. Sex does appear, quite frequently, and links many of the characters together but the film isn't all about sex. In fact sex is unembarrassing, pleasurable and regret free and although it appears often it seems simply to be presented as a fact of life.

Unfortunately everything else seems to be part of a dizzying metaphor in a cyclical plot. Unless deconstructing convoluted narratives is your thing this can be a problem. Lucia is a waitress who follows and seduces Lorenzo an author who writes books about passionate encounters and into cycle we go. Couplings, fantasies and melodramas unfold, events mirror each other, and the timeline twists and turns on itself and in the end (it all gets very metaphysical) I think Medem tries to tell us that imagination makes reality what we will. What's real and what is invention becomes irrevocably blurred (is this the point?). The symbolism becomes heavy handed, even the holiday island that the characters revolve around itself is almost not an island, criss-crossed by subterranean sea caves where one can enter at one point and emerge at another and fantastically rocks in stormy weather.

Despite the maturity and tenderness with which the love scenes are treated, the heavy handed symbolism and contortionist plot work to throw off any emotional intensity that the acting and powerful soundtrack can build. It ends up being too clever to exercise any real intelligence.

Lucia & the sex, or Julio Medem & poetry

[diztorted · 9/10 · 30 August 2001]

Every time I watch a film by Julio Medem, the same thing happens to me, and that is that I feel weightless and it feels like time is slower and the images have a different color. With this film, it was no exception; the moment the credits appeared and I left the theater my feet felt like I was floating over the ground.

This spanish auteur, has showed us throughout time, that he is able to wake up even the most hidden feelings from us and play with them as the pieces of the puzzles that are his movies are set together like in "vacas", "la ardilla roja" and most greatly in "los amantes del circulo polar".

What call my attention the most is that, I have the feeling that Medem tried to get away from his past with this story but ended up coming back to it, which is a great thing in the sense that the poetry and melancholy that is always present in his movies, are also part of this one.

The main question regarding the film is, What does "Lucia y el sexo" mean?, what is the correlation between what happens and the actual ritual of sex? You have to see it to get a conclusion...Is it love?, lust?, loss of innocence?, or just a part of the human condition? To get an idea, you have to let yourself go along the images and surely you might find the answer at the end.

One more thing, who wouldn´t fall in love with someone like Lucia? I would also say yes, the very first moment she would come near me.

A earnest misfire somewhere between prose and the paranormal

[=G= · 6/10 · 27 March 2003]

"Sex and Lucia" is a subtitled drama out of Spain which swirls around a head-to-toe scrumptious Vega as it wends its way circuitously through its convoluted plot. Unfortunately the story can't reach out and grab the audience in spite of fine performances and good everything else because the emphasis is not on the players but on the diddled up storyline which is about as interesting as a mobius strip. In short, the film messes with the time domain which is more confounding than engrossing, more novel than substantive, and, after a 2+ hour run, wears out more than wraps up. An honest, sincere misfire, this flick will be of most interest to those into Eurodramas with tastefully done sex, nudity, and French angst. (B-)

Porn and plot holes

[shengyang · 2/10 · 17 July 2003]

There is nothing to like about this movie. Even the much talked about sex scenes start to get boring, since they are so gratuitous and repetitive. The film is poorly scripted and none of the psychological reactions of the characters ring true. No one could take seriously the character of Lorenzo the novelist who writes such juvenile autobiographical stories. And what about the plot holes and loose ends? Why the hell does the family dog suddenly attack the young girl, with whom it had lived for years? What purpose does it serve to leave open the fate of the babysitter, her mother and Carlos (who literally disappears down a hole)? The movie tries to be deep, but fails embarrassingly.

A story full of advantages

[La_Maga · 10/10 · 12 February 2005]

This is the kind of movie you'll like and you'll have to see again. So smart, so amazingly entertaining, full of details you begin to realize as the end is approaching. As opposed to what some people may think, I believe that all the sex scenes, although they are pretty explicit, are totally necessary in order to tell the story and to show the characters just as they are. It's a movie to really think about and it goes from what it seems a twisted story full of rather weird elements to a (if you wanna see it in that way) sweet and simple love story. The acting was good, but mostly because there was a great book and a great direction behind it: Médem's work was remarkable. If you don't mind seeing some, you may say, awkward sex scenes, and you're looking for a really great plot, with great dialogs full of symbolisms, and also excellent photography, then you're just gonna love this one.

confusing

[jaap-4 · 7/10 · 26 February 2005]

It is probably a movie which is rated as great by women, since I really had to struggle to get this movie finished. It has some sex, a lot of dialogue, pretty people, not so much detail as for the environment it has been shot in. I think it deserves a 7 for complexity and especially for it is a Spanish film, which isn't very advanced compared to French or German productions. About the storyline, there's absolutely nothing to be said about that, you'll probably would want to judge for yourself.

See this film in spring or when you're in an obvious "I don't give a crap" mood :)

The "sell out" movie of a rather average director.

[BDPI · 1/10 · 20 February 2004]

Julio Medem had directed a few movies before this one, with his "key" movies (Vacas, Tierra, Ardilla roja, Amantes del circulo polar) being basically the same plot rehashed in a different way. The afore-mentioned movies, in my opinion reflected limited directorial skills and zero originality.

So, he "moves into the 2000s" with a movie in which you see a constant parade of genitals followed by sex. If you like naked bodies and uncensored sex, go for it by all means. However, don't try to pass it off as "transcendental" or "artistic" like Medem did.

There is no plot. None. You get more of a plot swirling a bowl of alphabet soup with your spoon. Even Najwa Nimri, usually extremely convincing and talented, phones this one in.

What it boils down to is this: if you want to see sex, see this movie. If you want to see a movie with sex and a plot, then keep looking.