Passionate and lusty, "Sex and Lucia," the new film from Julio Medem, the Spanish director of "Lovers of the Arctic Circle," is an adventurous ride through the dark corners of relationships and the subconscious.
Lucia (Paz Vega, previously seen in "Talk to Her") is a waitress in Madrid, and when the lights go down she is at work talking on the phone with her distressed boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa, "Open Your Eyes"), a successful novelist. When she rushes from work to be with him she finds their apartment empty. A phone call from the police brings her the bad news that he's been in an accident.
She takes the clues he's left behind after his apparent suicide and heads for a beautiful island where he once spent some time. It is there, amid the golden beaches that straddle deep blue seas, that she expects to discover what happened to render his life so unbearable. From this point on, as the plot jumps back and forth and dream sequences pop in, the story occasionally becomes obscured.
But along the way we discover secrets about Lorenzo's past, the unusual manner in which he and Lucia first met and became lovers and we get lots of intimate bedroom footage that makes the sexy film an artfully photographed, nearly soft-core sex picture.
Each of the people that Lucia meets on her travels in search of Lorenzo's secret has more than one identity and their lives all intersect in some way, although we don't really get to understand that until later on. In the end, nothing is as Lucia suspects, including Lorenzo's accident.
{INSERT_RELATED}Vega won a Goya Award for her role as the driven, distracted and distressed Lucia and she clearly deserves it for her masterful portrayal of a woman wounded and searching. The film garnered a dozen Goya nominations overall.
The scenes shot on the island are especially alluring, but all of the Kiko De La Rica's cinematography is lovely, providing an often epic backdrop to an intimate film.
"Sex and Lucia (Lucia y el Sexo)" opens Fri., Oct. 4 at Landmark's Oriental Theatre.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
