More than Sex and More than Lucia

It’s not just the sex; it’s the genius plot that makes your head spin in wonder and amazement. Sex and Lucia is an award winning 2011 film directed and written by Julio Medem starring Paz Vega and Tristan Ulloa. It revolves around the interwoven lives of people being linked by events of sudden encounters. Mostly set on a beach and an island, it is a beautiful masterpiece of location.

Lucia is a restaurant waitress who falls in love with Lorenzo who is a writer. They instantly got into a very passionate love affair and moved together in an apartment. Travelling back to the past, Lorenzo engaged in a one night stand at the beach with Elena who got pregnant with his child. She then ventures to find him. One night Lorenzo’s publisher revealed to him the truth about his daughter. This leads him to the park where he meets Luna his daughter and Belen who is the nanny. Later on Belen and Lorenzo ended up in an infidel affair. Then came up the tragedies that connects them all back in the end. These events were continuously written by Lorenzo, some are based on reality and some are fictionalized. Lucia alone is not the whole story itself though it’s engraved in the title. The story is about lives, sex, passion, escape, fantasy, and reality.

The movie is a wonderful play of past and present, and of real and fiction. One moment you’ll think it’s real, then the next you don’t. No transitional devices were used. For me it is good way of maintaining the plot’s mystery and thrill. Impressive montage as transitions is noticed though. The sun into a moon, the coin into a hole, the sound of moaning with sex into the shouting of giving birth is just some of its creative transition. The use of sound as irony though is distracting in the sense that the scene is serious and the sound is playful, I think it doesn’t fit. But the piano in the beginning is effective enough to create and support pace and movement as that was used while Lucia was running.

Some symbols are the moon and the sun. Lorenzo was named after the sun while Luna was named after the moon. The sun and moon never meets, and so the two characters are deprived to live together for long. One very important symbol is the hole which for me is death and life, beginning and end. In that hole is where everything started and it ended there. Some songs are significant too like the one being sung by Lucia “A Ray of Sunshine…”. It carries how positive as a person she is.

Director Ulloa has been unfair with the audience in revealing the movie’s truth but that was fair enough to add much spice and mystery to the film. That would effect on the film being really hard to forget because one will keep thinking about what really is after watching. Meanwhile, the sex is really not the point of the story but of significance to gain meaning. It is more than sex, and is more than Lucia.