6. Sex and Lucia (2001)
Lucia, a waitress, is talking on the phone to her depressed boyfriend Lorenzo. She is worried about him and races home to their apartment where she searches frantically for him. He has left a suicide note and the police ring... Unable to cope with the bad news, Lucia runs away to the Balearic islands. Flash to six years earlier, Lorenzo is having sex with a woman called Elena in the sea. They part company never to see each other again but she is pregnant and is in pursuit of him. Lorenzo is in a coffee shop discussing his writer's block with his agent. As he gets up from the table he notices Lucia who says she has been in love with him ever since his first book. Lorenzo is instantly smitten and they move in together. While his relationship with Lucia deepens, Lorenzo keeps putting off the deadlines with his publisher. When he finds out he has a daughter, Lorenzo takes to visiting her at school and meets her nanny Belen. He uses these encounters for inspiration for his book. Belen invites him over to Elena's for a meal while she babysits little Luna his daughter. Lorenzo reads her a story and then has sex with Belen. They are interrupted by Luna who is savaged to death by the family dog. Lorenzo runs away and falls into a deep depression. He continues to write about Belen and Lucia who is reading Lorenzo's work, believes it is all fictional. In the present time, Lucia meets a scuba diver called Carlos and through him Elena. Elena is running a boarding house to try and help her grief. Gradually the character's entanglements unravel and they find out the connection between them all. A very complicated film which involves a non linear narrative, Sex and Lucia nevertheless weaves a beautiful erotic lyricism over the piece. It features explicit scenes - both sexual and non-sexual - and it is not scared to show male full frontal nudity. The film in Spanish is called Lucia y el Sexo - Lucia and Sex. This is a much better translation of the title than Sex and Lucia which kind of implies that Lucia has a lot of sex in the film and she is the main protaganist. By naming it Lucia and Sex it is much more meaningful to the film - implying the effects that sex has had upon Lucia's life, not just her own sexual antics, but other people's too. This is a large part of the film - the effects other people's sexual behaviour has had on her.