Sex and Lucía: Club Medem

DIRECTED BY Julio Medem, 2001
STARRING Paz Vega (Lucía), Tristán Ulloa (Lorenzo), Najwa Nimri (Elena), Elena Anaya (Belén), Daniel Freire (Carlos)
CERTIFICATION 18
RUN TIME 123 mins approx, Metro Tartan
LANGUAGE Spanish

COVER QUOTE 'Daring, sexy… intensely erotic' - Sundance Film Festival

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Worth seeing for its three very beautiful Spanish actress leads, as well its playful, sometimes dark, take on sex.

THE PLOT Lucía, a waitress, calls her writer boyfriend, Lorenzo, from the restaurant where she works. He is depressed and she promises to help him; she wonders whether his problems relate to a trip, shrouded in secrecy, he once made to to an island. She gets home to their shared flat to discover Lorenzo is gone and has left a suicide note; when a policeman rings to say her boyfriend has been hit by a car she hangs up and packs her bags.

Six years earlier: Lorenzo has sex with a woman at the unnamed island; he only tells her that he is from Madrid and it is his birthday. Returning to Valencia, Elena discovers she is pregnant; she decides to head for Madrid to find the baby's father.

Meanwhile, Lorenzo starts seeing Lucía, who is obsessed with his first novel. On another birthday, Lorenzo learns he has a daughter, Luna; he befriends her and her nanny, Belén, at a playground. When Belén is babysitting for Luna one night, she invites Lorenzo to join her at Elena's home; Lorenzo and Belén start to have sex but Luna is attacked and killed by Elena's boyfriend's dog.

The film moves between these scenes and Lucía's current life on the island, where her only companions are the owner of the guesthouse where she is staying - Elena - and another guest, Carlos. Finally, the two women uncover the links between them; Lorenzo recovers from his accident and decides to travel to the island where first he meets Elena and then Lucía. The final scene shows Elena taking a photo of Luna in front of Lorenzo's apartment block; Lucía is in a window, singing.

THE FILM While cinema has shown writers struggling with writer's block - mainly by concentrating on other symptoms, such as alcoholism - it's less successful at depicting the process of writing. In some measure, this is director Julio Medem's attempt to redress that, providing a very sexy portrait of the creative process.

There's a great deal of other things going on here, too: the film constantly juxtaposes the two most obvious planets in our sky, the sun and the moon; there are the holes that run through Lorenzo's mysterious island, played here by Formentera, and there's a lot of water - in showers, from a hose pipe and in the sea. Then there's food, dreams and death.

The film is notable as the inclusion of two erect penises seemed to go largely unremarked. It features sexually confident women, including one who watches porn on her own, a trope visited in films as dissimilar as Lie with Me and Baise-Moi. Medem adds virtual lesbian incest to the mix, however, as Belén is turned on by watching her porn star mum's films. She fantasises that her mother's boyfriend watches her playing with herself in this way. Or does she?

These scenes could also be the imaginings of blocked writer Lorenzo, to whom Belén lends her mother's videos and with whom she shares some of her fantasies. He uses material from his own life and the meeting with Belén for a new book but, as the relationship between Belén, her mother and the mother's boyfriend degenerates, he creates his own material; when Lorenzo says he must sort their situation out, finally, it is as if he is threatening to kill real people, and his decision has real implications for the film's (fictional) characters.

There's lightness here, too, when Lucía and Lorenzo perform a mutual striptease; in a scene that could be from 9 Songs, they also take dirty pictures of each other. There's further wish-fulfilment: as Lorenzo notes, 'Girls like you never fall for guys like me.' It doesn't just happen once, either, but three times.

KEY SCENES Chapter 4, 24:56 Lucía is too drunk to have sex on her first night with Lorenzo but the next morning morning she takes a shower and wakes him up to take up where they left: 'Slowly,' she says as she wanks him, 'We're just starting out.' The scene elides into another:

Chapter 5, 27:59 'I have a camera,' Lorenzo announces. The couple proceed to take pictures with his Polaroid of each other nude, and having sex.
Chapter 8, 57:13 Lorenzo imagines bringing Belén off in the shower using the showerhead. In the consecutive scene she is shown copying her porn actress mother's poses in a porn video using a dildo taken from her mother's bedroom.
Chapter 9, 1:08:17 Belén borrows some underwear from her boss, Elena, and undresses for Lorenzo. She proceeds to seduce him in Elena's bedroom.
Chapter 12, 1:28:25 On the island, Lucía strips and is surprised to discover a naked, mud-covered Carlos lying on the beach. He rubs mud on her and starts to get an erection - Elena has already told Lucía that Carlos has the biggest cock she's ever seen - but Lucía says she isn't ready to have sex.

FURTHER VIEWING Sex and Lucía marked the close of an extremely productive decade for director Medem, starting with historical family drama Vacas in 1992. The quartet of films he produced in that time share many favourite themes - coincidence, wordplay (especially with names, notably in The Lovers of the Arctic Circle, 1998) - and visual tics, such as the fish-eye lens he uses to represent the view from inside a cow's eye (Vacas) or inside a jukebox, in The Red Squirrel.

In that 1993 film, Emma Suárez plays a woman rescued from a car accident by faded rock star Jota (Nancho Novo); when he discovers she has lost her memory he tells her she is his girlfriend. It's a gripping, if amoral, premise that naturally has repercussions for Jota, and it makes for a more taut film than Sex and Lucía, which is perhaps overburdened with themes and plot strands. The films share an earthy sensuality, plenty of underwater shots and even the leads, Suárez and Anaya, bear a physical resemblance.

The Red Squirrel, with its twisted take on memory and relationships, could serve as a precursor for Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes (1997), the film which was remade as Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz. (Open Your Eyes also featured Sex and Lucía's Najwa Nimri.) A surprisingly fascinating sports documentary, The Basque Ball, followed for Medem in 2003, while his latest, Room in Rome (2010), which reunites Anaya and Nimri briefly, hints at a rediscovery of Medem's sensual heart.

KEY QUOTE 'Put lots of sex in it, that's always nice' - Lorenzo's agent, Pepe

BONUS CURIO Spot the difference between the continental European (top) and UK/US (below) cover pictures, colour treatment notwithstanding.