"ONE OF THE MOST EROTIC MOVIES EVER MADE" screams the uppercase blurb in the local ads for "Sex and Lucia" (ads which, I might add, have airbrushed out one notable body part of Paz Vega, the Spanish starlet so hot that her nipple has been approved for European eyes only). While that may be true, it also happens to be one of the more confusing movies ever made. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again immediately – and not just for the volcanic lovemaking. I liked it, but I kind of needed a refresher course five seconds into the closing credits.
Involutely constructed as a kind of cyclical novel within a film, and, in fact, incorporating two separate scripts – one of which began life as a book by writer-director Julio ("Lovers of the Arctic Circle") Medem – "S&L" doesn't always bother to make explicit what's happening now, what's happening in flashback and what's happening within the pages of the novel being written by one of the main characters, a novel whose plot happens to be based on the events of the film. Got that?
Well, get this. It's still pretty darn good, despite its smarty-pants aura. Structurally audacious, visually rich and laced with Medem's love of symbols (in this case, the moon and holes, both those in the earth and those in the plot), "S&L" ostensibly tells the story of Lucia (Vega), a waitress who has just broken up with her author boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa).
As the narrative gets underway on the remote island to which Lucia has fled, we're led to believe that this will be a straightforward playback of the four years she and Lorenzo were together. But as we watch the twisted vine of their relationship grow, we also watch him write, incorporating elements of his own present and past, including a child named Luna he fathered many moons ago on – guess what? – a moonlit beach. Soon, it's less clear what's happening to whom. After all, what Lorenzo writes parallels what Medem has written, which is the filmmaker's way of reminding us that the universe he has created is as much a fiction as the one Lorenzo is spinning, or, for that matter, the one we live in. The best thing about Lorenzo's story, we're told, is that there is a hole at the end into which the reader can jump, only to resurface again in the middle.
It's a dizzy, and less than coherent, notion, to be sure, but the lightheadedness you might be experiencing at this point is appropriate to the theme of intoxicating, blinding lust.
Fortunately, as the story nears its conclusion, the threads do start to get ironed out a bit, as disparate characters rendezvous on the island paradise where Lucia has decided to hide out – an island said to be so pockmarked with caves and perforations that it isn't even attached to the ocean floor.
That unmoored Eden is an apt metaphor both for love and for the filmgoing experience itself. Floating through the story, at times adrift, a pliable audience member might feel like he or she could fall in love with "Lucia" too, as long as you let your mind go.
SEX AND LUCIA (Unrated, 128 minutes) – Contains nudity, obscenity and copious and fairly graphic sex. In Spanish with subtitles. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle 5, Shirlington 7 and Landmark Theatres Bethesda Row Cinema.
