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Lucía in Wonderland: Paz Vega goes in search of her lost boyfriend on a nameless island in 'Sex and Lucía.' Rabbit Hole 'Sex and Lucía' dishes up Borgesian erotica from Spain By Richard von Busack In its native Spain, the film Sex and Lucía is known as Lucía and Sex; the title reversal for export stresses the real appeal of the film in our nation of unsexy movies. But Sex and Lucía really ought to have been titled Emmanuelle on Borges Island. A Madrid waitress named Lucía (Paz Vega, a cross between Winona Ryder and Patricia Arquette) falls immediately in love with a blocked writer who comes to her restaurant. Lorenzo (Tristán Ulloa) and Lucía have wild sex and move in together. But as the months go past, Lucía begins to realize that she doesn't have all of the writer's attention. Is it the book Lorenzo is laboring over--is that her rival? Or is Lorenzo distracted by his own memory of a tryst he had long ago on a faraway beach? Later, when Lorenzo turns up missing, he is presumed dead under circumstances that Lucía doesn't really investigate. Most lovers would want to say goodbye, if only to the body. Instead, she decides to go for a vacation on the unnamed Mediterranean island where Lorenzo once lived (and where, we know, he had that one magic evening years ago). While Lucía is exploring a cliff, she falls into a hole. The hole is real--the opening of a cave. But it's also symbolic, since once Lucía falls in, the story starts again from the beginning, this time telling us all the details that Lucía knew nothing of. We learn of Lorenzo's simmering affair with a nanny named Belén (Elena Anaya), a woman with a fantastically troubled sex life (she lusts after her own mother). And we also learn that the child in Belén's care has a secret of her own. The little girl is a key to the unfinished business that tormented Lorenzo. Confused yet? Sex and Lucía would be an easy-to-read sexual melodrama if it weren't for the Möbius-strip plot. The most flamboyant parts--Belén's anarchic sex life--may be so unbelievable because they're fiction within fiction, a creation of Lorenzo's writing. This could be the story of a writer having a torrid affair with one of his characters. But the idea of who, what, or where in Sex and Lucía becomes more a matter of opinion than fact, because director and writer Julio Medem (Lovers of the Arctic Circle) delivers some passages with marbles in his mouth. Take, for example, the death of a little girl in a savage dog attack, a sequence so badly directed that you can't figure out what happened for nearly an hour afterward. Sex and Lucía offers the familiar disconcerting effect of sitting through a movie in which the reels have been confused. The careless viewer may watch it as fancy-schmancy erotica, upon which level it works very well. However, a dry satire of the banality of men's sexual fantasies can be just as banal as men's fantasies themselves. 'Sex and Lucía' opens Friday, July 26, at the Rafael Film Center. [ North Bay | Metroactive Central | Archives ]