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Art and the Artist
FILM: Sex and Lucia (NR)
DIRECTOR: Julio Medem
STARRING: Paz Vega, Tristan Ulloa
WHERE: Canal Place
GRADE: A
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Lucia (Paz Vega) falls in love with a writer and his sense of tragedy in the brilliant Sex and Lucia, now playing at Canal Place.
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In an opening reminiscent of that used by Anthony
Minghella in The English Patient, Spanish writer/director Julio Medem begins
his captivating Sex and Lucia with what appears to be a night traveling
shot over barren landscape, even that of the moon perhaps, a wasteland of empty
sand rising and falling in contours like those of a young woman's body. As the
credits roll, the desert yields to scrub vegetation and then to tall stands of
grass, wheat perhaps, bending acrobatically in unison to and fro in the wind.
Then the first of Medem's artful tricks, this one purely visual: we aren't traveling
through a grain field at all, but along the sea bottom, through a bed of kelp
whipped this way and that by the ebb and flow of the tide. And thus Medem puts
us on early notice. The film we are about to see is not what it first appears.
It's a shape shifter, a magician's illusion, a work that dares revise itself.
In its own terms it is both the sun that banishes the darkness and the darkness
that gives light to the moon.
Sex and Lucia is the story of Lorenzo
(Tristan Ulloa), a Madrid writer struggling with his second book, and his waitress
girlfriend Lucia (the luminous Paz Vega). Fearlessly direct, Lucia approaches
Lorenzo in a bar and announces that she's read his debut novel and decided beyond
doubt that she's in love with him. Within hours they are in his bed, and from
that time forward they live together, at first enjoying rapturous episodes of
energetic sex (rendered far more explicitly than anything an American filmmaker
would dare) and later settling into cozy domesticity. As in Eden, the serpent
in their garden appears as a question mark. Lucia reads Lorenzo's new book and
finds it proficient rather than dazzling. She thinks the second novel is too
happy; she misses the tragedy of the first.
We don't know if Lorenzo even publishes this
second work of fiction. But soon his agent Pepe (Javier Camara) appears to revisit
an earlier proposal that Lorenzo write a fictional account of a mutually ecstatic
and deliberately anonymous one-night stand Lorenzo had several years ago with
a blond Valencia chef named Elena (Najwa Nimri). For added fodder, Pepe reveals
that Elena has relocated to Madrid and that her single rendezvous with Lorenzo
has produced a daughter, Luna (Silvia Llanos), now four. Lorenzo is intrigued,
and Pepe arranges for him to meet Luna at her school without having to encounter
Elena.
A more conventional filmmaker would assemble
these narrative ingredients to test Lorenzo's natural paternal instincts against
his yearnings to be a faithful lover to Lucia. Instead, Lorenzo plummets disastrously
into an unseemly relationship with Luna's barely legal-age nanny Belen (Elena
Anaya). Though subsequent scenes attest definitively to her sexual maturity,
Belen is so youthful we at first think her another school child. In short, lust
is not one of the seven deadly sins by accident. Belen lures Lorenzo with confessions
about masturbating while fantasizing about him and even naughtier tales of watching
pornographic videos starring her own mother. Lorenzo's involvement with Belen
is indisputably sinful and indisputable evidence for why "lead us not into temptation"
is a central plea in the Lord's Prayer.
In brilliantly paired ironic developments,
Lorenzo draws artistic inspiration from his assignation with Belen while his
extensively embellished account of a love triangle among Belen, her mother,
and her mother's lover is greeted with unbridled praise from the reader who
matters to him most: Lucia. On repeated occasions during this stretch of the
movie we are not immediately certain whether we are watching "real" scenes or
"enacted" scenes from Lorenzo's novel in progress.
At the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen's
Alvy Singer turns to the camera and apologizes for the happy ending of a play
he's written, explaining how artists often try to make work out in their fictions
what they can't make work out in their real lives. Medem is up to something
comparable. The story he's written for Sex and Lucia is inevitably tragic
for someone: either Elena who leaves her home in search of her baby's father,
Lucia who stands to be abandoned, or Belen who needs to encounter adults capable
of restraining themselves, or all three. But even as Medem sustains the narrative
tension over the forks and intersections of these sad possibilities, he guilefully
asserts the craft of revision. Announced through a bedtime story Lorenzo tells
Luna, Medem warns that Sex and Lucia has a hole in its end through which
one can escape to its middle and change the course of what follows. Just as
the sex is both honest and prurient, a barker's come-on to a metafictional puzzle,
Medem is an illusionist to the end. He shows us an empty hat all at once nesting
a dove. In the end, we have heartache or healing, neither or both.
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