Sex and Lucía (2001)

Julio Medem's Sex and Lucía arrives from 2001 carrying the scent of salt water and the faintly embarrassed memory of a decade when European art cinema could still sell tickets on the promise of unclothed Mediterranean people. The plot concerns Lucía, a Madrid waitress who flees to the Balearic island of Formentera after a suspected suicide, and the six years of tangled romantic history she is fleeing from. There is also a novel within the film, a dead child, a lighthouse, and a great deal of swimming. Medem interweaves these strands with genuine formal ambition. The light is beautiful. The bodies are numerous.

For the purposes of classification, we must report that the film carries no social program whatsoever. Its nudity exists to arouse, not to affirm. Its female lead is a vessel for male longing and male guilt, not a vehicle for any argument about autonomy or power. The cast is Spanish because the film is Spanish. The island is photographed because it is pretty, not because the sea is dying. Nobody in this story is poor in a way that indicts anyone, and nobody is rich in a way that requires redistribution. The various infidelities, pregnancies, and illegitimate children are treated as private catastrophes. Not once does a character turn to the camera to explain what the audience ought to think.

This leaves us with a film that is sensual, elliptical, and entirely untroubled by contemporary conscience. It is a melodrama about desire and grief, made by a director more interested in the geometry of coincidence than in the improvement of society. The result is elegant, occasionally preposterous, and free of instruction. We record it accordingly, with the mild professional regret of an inspector who arrives at a building expecting to find violations and discovers only a well-kept garden.