Lucía (Paz Vega) is a waitress in Madrid who is having boyfriend trouble, and finds it difficult to grasp what precisely it is that is the matter with him. Him being Lorenzo (Tristán Ulloa), a writer who has been suffering from a block to his creativity that has brought on a heavy depression - or has the depression been brought on by something else? Lucía would like to know, but as he phones her up at work, where she doesn't have time to chat, she can tell he's going to do something drastic and implores him to stay safe until she can get home. But once she arrives, there's no one there: and then police call with bad news...
One of those melodramas where everything would be resolved if the characters simply sat down and talked to each other, Sex and Lucia won its writer and director Julio Medem more acclaim than he had ever had in his substantial career, internationally at any rate. Others, however, may have been able to ascertain the mark of pretentious Euro art house about it, but that was not to say it was not possible to enjoy the film as much for those flaws and affectations as it would have been without them. Indeed, without the gleaming (if clinically digital) photography, swooning romanticism and plotline coincidences, this may well never have stayed with so many viewers.
And then there was another element that made it memorable for those who caught it, as this was one of the dramas that arrived around the turn of the millennium that featured close to hardcore, and at times actual hardcore, sexual content. For most of these, if the point was not to titillate the audience then it would set you wonder what the point was otherwise, as in this case where Medem took the approach that he was going to be frank about sex and its place in relationships, but after a while you got the impression that every time there was a lull in the melodrama, he asked one of his leading ladies to whip off their clothes to perk up everyone watching.
Not just the women, either, as the men took their togs off too, and Medem included saucy inserts to make them look aroused. So if this was not a porn movie what was it? One of its main problems was that it was difficult to relate to twists and turns woven into the story of Lucía and Lorenzo, as though she did not have a murky past he did, and just as she has been reading his novel to find out more about the man she passionately loves, once he has had his accident (or was it a suicide attempt?) and she believes him to be dead, the rest of his life opens out before her as if she were still taking in his fiction. Which turns out not to be so fictional after all, and it stems from his fling on a Spanish island six years ago.
For both Lorenzo and Elena (Najwa Nimri) there was nothing serious about their holiday romance, they enjoyed the sex and that was it - Elena thought it to be the best she had ever had. But oh dear, they should have used protection because when she got back home she found she was pregnant with his daughter, something that as they had agreed never to contact each other again, Lorenzo never knew about. Not for a few years, anyway, as fickle fate made his path cross with another, no, not Elena, but Belén (Elena Anaya), Elena's nanny who provides Lorenzo with lustful thoughts, leading to a night which should have been full of passion, but ended up one of tragedy.
Medem does not spell all this out, and leaves you to work much of it out yourself perhaps because it is a bit daft and a mystery will lend it more substance. Implementing a Nicolas Roeg-style fracturing of time to his narrative does pay dividends because as you're watching you are certainly intrigued, and the fact that this is all very easy on the eye and yes, arty also works in its favour. The importance of even the briefest encounters appears to be what it is about, as long as they had a sufficient impact on those doing the encountering, but you may find yourself remembering the sex regardless of how the emotional content connects with you. But then, sequences such as the one where Belén masturbates herself silly to her porn actress mother's own video tends to have that effect, as if sexual fantasies had been plonked down in a self-consciously sensitive story to somewhat absurd ends. Music by Alberto Iglesias.
