Reviews & Ratings for
Sex and Lucia More at IMDbPro »Lucía y el sexo (original title)

Writing beauty, 22 February 2007
Author: ruiresende84 (ruiresende84@gmail.com) from Porto, Portugal

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

(possible spoilers right here)

"the first advantage is that in the end the story doesn't end. It falls in a hole and restarts from the middle [...] the second and greatest advantage is that we can change the its course from there."

This quite sums the "advantages" of Medem's film-making. What we get with Lucia y el Sexo is just great. Fantastic screen-writing, warm, absolutely beautiful in every aspect, visual or written. Writing is the theme. Written reality. Cinema has evolved to explore it. In here, the reality is written by Lorenzo's writing. I'll try to get to it. The title is deceiving. The focus is not on sex, nor Lucia; sex comes as trigger to every other emotion/event and (des)encounter (so Lucia and sex are in relation to Lorenzo, both). The concern is in the writing as creator of reality. All the women are, nevertheless, extremely beautiful, as it is the hole mood of the film. Like he had done already remarkably with "Los amantes de lo circulo polar", Medem plays with an enormous complexity in space-time level. He is truly a master, of the so called non linear narrative, he is fully conscient of its effects on the audience (that's the point of being an artist, to control what you show and provoke). Coincidence? Chance? Fate?. Medem's drama lives on these things, the loose ends that eventually bound together, sometimes on pure coincidence, which gathers an impressive credibility when worked out by this director. The driving link of the spectator's attention is to get to the end of all those coincidences and find out what's in there (once more like in his other major experiment, "los amantes..."). This is modern storytelling, the most advanced we can get at this moment.

The trick in Medem's case (and it is where he departs from his other Spanish speaking filmmakers, like Iñarritu or Cuálron) is to work with realities that may or not be provisional. As a spectator, you never know whether you are watching to the film's reality or to fiction inside Lorenzo's fiction. We also get rather unclear (or with the clatiry Medem allows) where and when the action takes place. He creates places, in imagination, non physical (the film becomes itself its own place, in indefinite time, in a Medem drawn world). The own island has its own unknown contours, undefined, we don't know if it is desert or occupied, or how far it is from "reality".

The soundtrack is discreet but efficient. The theme is lyrical by principle, coherent with the rest, and it takes the film to some relation with Italian lyrical cinema (Tornatore's direction, Rota or Piovani's music). It's an interesting mixture, we had seen it already in "La teta i la lluna", by Lunas (spanish, catalan to be precise) with Piovani's soundtrack (italian). This mixes the production conceived to be beautiful in every moment (italian) with the constant search for the inconscience in human mind (Medem studied psychiatry), the unknown in the soul and the absolute drama, in a contemporary view.

Obviously the photography is over the top on purpose (dream like), with excessive exposure to the light, but that is a choice i don't agree. But that is a really minor flaw, taking the other "advantages"

My evaluation: 4/5. I do believe Medem will soon produce something worth maximum rate. i'll wait for it. Meanwhile, don't miss this

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