16:19 Oh, I adore this film. | |
| 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. | |
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