Sex and Lucia (2001)

Sabtu, 28 April 2007

Sex and Lucia (2001)

Sex and Lucia (Julio Medem, 2001)
Spanish Title: Lucía y el sexo

Julio Medem's Sex and Lucia is such a confounding film, quite frustratingly so. Characters appear, disappear and reappear. Settings evoke an air of unearthiness and mysticism. Sex is almost too erotic, just a few steps above being too sinful. It lures, and teases. The moment you get a feeling that you already have a good grasp of its overflowing narrative, it forces you to let go by throwing a few more tricks to your inconvenience. Despite that, it's still a good film --- incredibly sexy, unbearably magnetic, and quite surprisingly, very coherent.

Lucia (Paz Vega) sojourns in a remote Mediterranean island after learning that her long-time boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristán Ulloa) has killed himself. The island is also the setting of Lorenzo's wildest one-night stand with Elena (Najwa Nimri) in the middle of the ocean, underneath a moon-lit sky. During Lucia's stay in the island, she meets several characters from Lorenzo's past, including Elena (who is taking care of the island's hotel) and scuba-diving Carlos (Daniel Freire), and encounters several metaphors from Lorenzo's own novels, including a mysterious hole in the middle of the island, a lighthouse, and other curious phenomenon.

The other half of the film, told through flashbacks that mix what is offered to be real and what is imagined, details Lucia's relationship with Lorenzo --- from the point wherein Lucia proposes her love to him inside a side-street cafe, to the time when their relationship crumbles with Lorenzo's breakdown over personal problems and the accompanying rigors of writing. The reality of Lorenzo's life gets mixed up with his art. Characters from his novel seem to be derived from the eventualities of real life; then these characters start to breathe a life of their own, their personalities and sensibilities intermixing with reality, until you wouldn't be able to discern which is taking over and which is subordinate.

Medem makes you believe that there are two aspects to his films --- of the real world and the world within Lorenzo's novel; of the periods before and after Lorenzo's suicide; of sex and Lucia. However, the entire film actually belongs within Lorenzo's novel-in-the-making. The contrivances, and the unrealistic plot mechanics (the dog accident and the entire scenario that revolved around it is surely something that doesn't belong in our conventional concept of a real world) are all too literary to evolve within the framework of real-life experiences; and I believe Medem is that talented a writer-director to know what fits in a film that details reality.

The entire film is nourished (as much as it also nourished by an abundance of naked flesh and sexy scenarios) by an explicit attraction to the mystical, whether it be during the moments that are implied as within-novel, or real. Medem drapes his day scenes with an abundance of sunlight (Lucia is also heard singing a song about the sun); while the night scenes are made distinct by the appearance of a very attractive moon (its presence lingers because of the name of Lorenzo's daughter, and other devices). The island itself is described as a natural anomaly; a lid in the middle of the sea with labyrinthine underground passages and its tides affecting the human mind. The entire film feels generally like a modern Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, or at least externally reads like one, with its adherence to magic realism. Even the sex scenes have that literary imaginative character.

The biggest mistake in watching Sex and Lucia is to try making something logical about it or to perceive it as a film with a fractured narrative, because it shouldn't be logical nor is it a puzzle to be solved. The film is something to get engaged in (and its sexiness does help a lot in that bit) and to enjoy in all its unabashedly pulpy naked glory.

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This post is my contribution to Culture Snob: The Misunderstood Blog-A-Thon.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Rabu, 25 April 2007

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Spanish Title: El Laberinto del Fauno

In the much-lauded Pan's Labyrinth, writer-director Guillermo del Toro plunges us head-first into the fragile worldview of young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero). The film opens with a beautiful lullaby being overpowered by the sound of heavy painful breathing. We learn of the setting --- Spain in 1944 wherein the last remnants of the revolution are in the remote mountains. The first recognizable image we see is the protagonist Ofelia, her face and hands bloodied; it is quite apparent that the initial heavy breathing we heard came from her and that she is dying. It's a cruel portrait; the little girl is lovely in her youthful innocence (her eyes desperately clinging for a dimming sparkle of hope) yet in that precious age, has met an untimely violent death. It's enough a warning that this film is definitely not a fairy tale for it aches with such resounding and poignant realism, it's almost unbearable to watch further.

But of course I do, quite thankfully at that for the rest of the film is just wonderful. We learn of the fairy tale of a princess that escaped from her mythical kingdom, and upon reaching the surface, died as a mortal. Ofelia and her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) are on their way to a remote mill wherein the fascists under Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez) are fighting off the last few remaining rebels. The mill estate, surrounded by hectares of forests, contain several secrets including a labyrinth wherein Ofelia will meet an ancient faun who identifies her as the lost princess in the fairy tale.

There's a gorgeous intertwining of imagination and reality here. Those two aspects of the film symbiotically thriving alongside each other; each giving the other depth, meaning and context. The easiest interpretation is to delegate Ofelia's fantastical adventures as exclusively within the realm of her imagination. Such adventures are merely defense mechanisms against an oppressive situation she has landed in. However, the child in me opts to probe further; suggesting that the fantasy and the reality do co-exist, at least, for the sake of the protagonist whose demise has been announced so very early on. True, the fantastic elements are defense mechanisms or instruments for survival against that particular situation for the young girl, but more than that, those elements have real linkages with the historic scenario --- that the faun, the fairies, and those other magical beings' slight existence in the world are reminders of this world's coming-of-age, of it's difficult path into achieving a complete worldliness and mundanity; and the pay-off is the loss of innocence, and of the ability to conjure the magical.

Del Toro consistently draws battles between the mundane and innocence. Notice that Ofelia's three tasks are always conflicted by earthly needs and virtues --- of keeping a dress clean for dinner, of her worries for her mother, of hunger, of blood relations. In Ofelia's mission to regain her status as a princess, there is a need for her to withdraw from the world, to sacrifice inch by inch a portion of what keeps her human. Rationality should have made the mission easy for Ofelia, being trapped in that mortal world ruled over by the Capitan, who personifies everything that is wrong in her world, and complicated further by her mother's difficult pregnancy and a forced knowledge on the eventualities of the rebellion. However, it is that undeniable humanity of Ofelia that makes those tasks difficult. Along with the rest of the world, Ofelia is also on that verge of growing up and of experiencing the pains and aches of the world unshielded. She's in her most volatile; which is the reason why her world-view is always undecided (escapist or resolute; fantastical or realist; aloof or connected).

By crafting a Capitan who's almost un-humanly vicious, he commits a comparable paternal affection to the shrewd faun, with its jerky gestures that suggest decades of immobility. Additionally, the monsters, from the eternally hungry giant toad to the severely savage pale monster, become reasonably tame to the arbitrariness of the Capitan, considering that in his appearance, he elicits an inherited posture of pride and debonairness. Quite interestingly, the Capitan shares a trait with one of children's literature's most popular villains, Captain Hook --- that affinity with the tick-tocking of a pocket watch which in both cases appear in close encounters with death. In a sense, the affinity between the two characters connote a similarity in their roles in both tales. Capitan Vidal is the personification of the world's strict mundaneness as against Ofelia's fanciful escapism; the same way as Captain Hook is an adult in Peter Pan's Never Never Land.

Of course, there are other allusions to other fairy tales (Alice in Wonderland, being one of the most obvious). It's actually quite a nice touch as del Toro eagerly tells his dark depressing tale set in a dark depressing time, yet subconsciously, grants us comfort by inviting our collective imaginations (as charged by those familiar tales) to delve deeper into the connections of those tales with our respective lives.

These same fairy tales have allowed Ofelia to gain a prolonged innocence that salvaged her from the violent affairs of her adult wards. Much like the melodies that lulled us to peaceful sleep, these remainders of that far-away childhood gives us comfort from the rigors of the day-to-day world we've grown up to live in. The stories, the lullabies, that earnest sparkle of hope, and that final withdrawal from a world descending into mundaneness, were the keys Ofelia needed to open the gate to that mythical kingdom.