Product Details

• Released on: 2002-10-28
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 123 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The opening of Sex and Lucia transforms the viewer into a hypnotic state of relaxation with shots of the deep blue sea. However, director Julio Medem has other ideas and immediately thereafter thrusts us into a modern-day restaurant where we first meet Lucia who is trying to prevent her boyfriend Lorenzo from committing suicide. Having returned home to find his infamous "note", she runs away to the island Lorenzo spoke of. Here the narrative becomes disjointed, jumping from past, to present, to imagination through Lorenzo's novel.

The premise of the film revolves around relationships and how the past comes back to haunt us all. Although the title indicates that there may be a level of pornography, the film does gauge itself on sex in the middle of the film--to little effect. As with great horror movies, it's what the imagination leads us to think is there and not what we see that titillates our senses and over indulgence leads to boredom after a while (perhaps this was Medem's intention?). However, despite this minor flaw Medem's imagery, as always, is stunning, from the relationship between the moon and the sun, to the sea and the beach, to the blatantly phallic lighthouse with a port hole, every image adds to the plot and once the narrative ties up the loose end you'll feel emotionally revitalised.

On the DVD: Sex and Lucia holds a disappointing array of special features. Roger Clarke's film notes are informative, but like the filmographies is pure text. It also includes the option to play without English subtitles. While the features are disappointing, the soundtrack and visual images offer nothing but unadulterated bliss; you can almost feel the sea wash over you. --Nikki Disney

Special Features
Anamorphic Wide Screen
DVD 5
Spanish
Region 0
Dolby Digital Spanish
Dolby Digital
Star And Director Filmographies
Scene Selection
Optional Subtitles
Original Theatrical Trailer
Roger Clarke Film Notes
Julio Medem Trailer Reel
English

Synopsis
A Madrid waitress, Lucia (Paz Vega), is mourning the loss of her boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa), who passed away mysteriously. Unable to come to terms with his death, she takes a trip to a Mediterranean island that he told her about long ago, thinking about the novels Lorenzo wrote and the way that his work moved her. In flashbacks Lucia remembers her passionate relationship with him, and tries to reconcile some unresolved feelings. She is also debating whether his death was a suicide or simply an accident. Shifting time frames and memories combine with Lorenzo's stories and blur the activity of the present. Meanwhile, Lucia befriends some people at the beach--Carlos (Daniel Freyre), Elena (Najwa Nimri), and Belen (Elena Anaya)--with whom she finds common ground and another layer of connection to Lorenzo. SEX AND LUCIA, with its sultry eroticism, testing and questioning of fate and the unpredictability of life, and its brightly bleached beach scenes, is a winding, nostalgic journey. Directed by Julio Medem (LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE), SEX AND LUCIA was received with acclaim at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Customer Reviews

A gem
An enthralling story that ebbs and flows to the control of the central theme the moon. The story initially floats on a tide of desire to one of despair and then drops through one of the analogous holes in the island to reappear on a different shore. The threads of this movie are interwoven in a way that is particularly well portrayed by the main character played by Paz Vega and the lines between fact and fiction are constantly blurred by an author being hurtled out of his block period.

Hypnotic Spanish masterpiece
Sex and Lucia engages mind and body with its time-bending narrative and images of beauty. The story shifts between past and present, fact and fiction, so a plot summary won't capture it, but... A young writer named Lorenzo falls into a passionate relationship with a waitress named Lucía. But he also finds himself drawn to a young nanny taking care of a child who just might be the result of an anonymous fling Lorenzo had with a woman he met on an island the year before. Lorenzo fantasizes about the lives of all of these women until a horrific event sends him into a suicidal depression. This may sound obscure or flat, but Sex and Lucía unfolds clearly and beautifully, featuring stunning visual images of both nature and flesh, and weaving a poetic spell much like the director's previous film, The Lovers of the Arctic Circle.
SEX AND LUCIA is an absolutely brilliant blend of sex and story, of plot and circumstance, of reality and the art of crafting fiction around it. The film mesmerizes in its wonderfully poignant and wild portrayal of unabashedly adult sex while equally balanced with mature themes surrounding the human condition exploring life and liveliness ... and I've never seen anything quite like it before.
Sumptuously photographed on tropical islands not overloaded with lush foliage, SEX AND LUCIA vacillates between several storylines -- all uniquely intertwined by Lucia's exploration to find happiness and Lorenzo's quest to understand the life hidden behind the art of his writing. The two meet under terrifically charged circumstances, and their lives together reach a feverish intimate crescendo.

However, Lorenzo begins to fathom the consequences of the life he's led, leading him on a quest to understand who he is and how he could possibly have reached a new low in his life. Happiness thwarts his talents, and, instead, he allows the moments of human weakness he's experienced to drive him as emotionally low as a human being can possibly slip ... to the brink of death.

In the meantime, Lucia flees, unable to cope with the reality of Lorenzo's possible fate, and inadvertantly discovers that the life she's been leading is secretly intertwined with others, much in the way good novels unfold.

A grand, metaphorical mystery and a radical piece of cinema
Without meaning to sound crass, Sex and Lucia (2001) is essentially a film, both literally and figuratively, about holes. We can look at and interpret these various holes in number different ways, be it in the more obvious creation of the cavernous dents that litter the film's expressionistic landscape, or instead, as metaphorical places for the characters to hide. On top of this we also have the holes as a sexual metaphor; with the sub-textual references to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the various thematic ideologies that such a notion presents, with the central character falling into a hole and being re-born into her own story; while later in the film, the male protagonist disappears into a hole and never returns. We also have the more erotic notion of the hole, as illustrated by the holes on the beach surround the obvious, phallic-like light-house.

Here however, director Julio Medem is more concerned with how these holes in both the design of the film and its structure can be used as a means of navigating the audience through his various interweaving strands of character, narrative and the potential for multiple thematic outcomes. With this in mind, Sex and Lucia becomes less of a film in the conventional sense and more of a detective story for the audience to follow; existing in the same self-reflexive, psychological realm as Medem's other great features, such as Vacas (1991), The Red Squirrel (1993) and The Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998), which each present similar ideas pertaining to the creation of a particular character and the world in which they inhabit. With Sex and Lucia however, we have alongside this titular character a handful of secondary characters that drift in and out of the film to supply clues before disappearing without a trace. To add further elements of confusion, paradox and open-ended interpretation, Medem skilfully juggles these characters between each varying strand, culminating in several possible stories each being woven simultaneously, but all leading back to the idea of the writer and the story that he (or she) is creating.

It isn't as confusing as the interpretation would suggest, with the film rewarding patient and imaginative viewers with something that could be described as anything from a grand mystery, a cinematic enigma or a multi-layered riddle, wherein the stories are given the room to weave in and out of one another, creating windows that lead into dreams and everything is in some way connected. For anyone familiar with Medem's previous work it is clear that some elements of the plot are supposed to remain indecipherable. The director wants us to go back and re-experience the film like we would a novel; each time picking up subtle nuggets of information we may have missed the first time around. It is important to remember when watching Sex and Lucia that we are dealing - as stated above - not with a single story, but with several or more stories each being spun concurrently. When we begin to look at the internal logic of the story we see the fracturing of two separate elements. To better understand the film we must look at the plot, not from the point of view of Lucia, but from the perspective of the writer, noting how each of his sub-plots come to reflect the main elements of the story.

So, we have a writer submitting a book about a couple's sensual holiday and eventual one-night stand. We then have the characters from that book losing touch, getting on with their lives, discovering the existence of a baby and eventually trying to track-each other down. Then we have the writer trying to write a novel about the new woman in his life. This book has none of the tragedy of the former, instead dwelling on love and sexual elation. Unsatisfied with this, the writer then begins to draw parallels with this story and the previous one, by re-introducing characters and adding a subplot of infidelity; all of which will climax on the island where the original story began. So there we have three novels within the film each being read, written or re-interpreted and each of them coming to reflect an element of Medem's film. Throughout the film the writer relates his story to various people; at one point even explicitly mentioning the hole in the middle that leads back into the story and the central idea behind the film. It is at this point that Medem begins incorporating narrative elements from the couple's gossipy conversation on the bench, the child's bedtime story, the internet relationship, the suicide note and finally, a central character's coma-induced fantasies. There are also some wonderful examples of character doubling, coupling and mirroring between the leads, which recalls the similarly complex experiments of Jacques Rivette's Celine & Julie Go Boating (1972) and is also Buñuelian almost in its execution.

Medem's stylistic touches make the film all the more deceptive; creating a wonderful, alien landscape for his characters to interact with. As well as this, we also have an exceptional use of cinematography, where the camera is always mobile: circling, tracking, blocking, revealing; really becoming one with the characters and bringing us into both the fun and frivolity as well as the mystery. The editing works in as similar fashion, with Medem keeping the structure tight and rhythmic as he merrily jump cuts from one thing to the next, but always keeping the separate elements connected. Though some will obviously be put off by the explicit scenes of sexuality and the bold experiments with plot and character, for me, this is really a remarkable piece of cinema; one in which the literal plot holes are there to be explored, especially if we want to fully understand the film's gloriously tangled narrative and ambiguous shifts in time and place.